This Week's Reading

This week I read Educating Esme. It is an interesting memoir of a teacher's first year in a Chicago inner city elementary school. I highly recommend it to teachers, if you can get past some of the language. The author, Esme Codell, shows the brutal reality of the public education system, where we expect kids to perform to our expectations no matter what is going on in their lives. The author is candid and truthful about her students, her administation, her successes, and her failures in both funny and sad entries.

I'm always asking my students to respond to their reading - so, here is my response to this book. I made a self-to-text connection. I realized reading this that I often overestimate and many times underestimate the abilities of my students. When I worked at an inner city school that last couple of years, I always felt that I was making excuses for my students -- they live in poverty, they don't have a mom/dad, they are exposed to gangs, and drugs and guns -- but now I realize that students in every school have problems. Now, my students are constantly facing parent's divorcing, language barriers because mom/dad (even the student) doesn't speak English, and a host of other issues. I need to love each student unconditionally and do everything in my ability to teach them the standards and about conflict management and about friendship and love.