'Educating Esme' chronicles first-year teaching experience

"Educating Esme" is the real-life chronicle of a first-year teacher, Esme Codell. She describes the ups and downs of teaching for the first time, in inner city Chicago.

She speaks very bluntly about everything she goes through as a first-time teacher from disliking her principal to praying for her students. She experiences things that a teacher of many years would find hard to deal with -- things that might seem to break a first-year teacher. However, Esme stays strong and does what she thinks is right at the time, although she may regret it later.

The book begins with Madame Esme, as she insists her students call her, describing how her student-teaching experience made her realize the importance of honesty in the classroom and how this value becomes the basis for how she ran her own classroom. She's a very unconventional teacher, and I found myself looking forward to seeing how she responded to different situations. As a future elementary teacher myself, I found I was taking notes on ideas she had such as literary fairs, time machines, and role playing.

Esme has a truth to her that not many people have and it is refreshing. One thing I admire about her is the way she is with her students. She treats them as equals and has them participate actively as individuals of the group instead of babying them and making them feel they were beneath her standard. Esme will keep you guessing and show you how with just a little more work and imagination, students can become what many educators have always told them they could be - anything.

Melinda Chaffin is the assistant manager at Empire Books and News at Pullman Square in downtown Huntington.