Showing results by narrator "Esme Codell" in All Categories

This is the diary of Esme Raji Codell, a first-year teacher at a Chicago public school. Codell describes the frustrations - incompetent administrators, abusive parents, gang members and, at times, her own insecurities - she encountered when she began her teaching career in this inner-city school and the unique ways she approached them. As Codell puts it, she has "Thirty-one children. Thirty-one chances. Thirty-one futures, our futures. Everything they become, I also become."

Esmé tells us about the night she and her mother became "egg vigilantes" against an illegally parked car; her freewheeling first school, where kids sat on sofas instead of at desks and could choose disco dancing instead of math; her dangerous neighborhood, which her father made seem friendly...