Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher's First Year Chapter Summary & Analysis - Part III: Pages 135 through 149 Summary

Part III: Pages 135 through 149 Summary and Analysis

April 5: Mr. Turner has a teachers' meeting in which an "educational chiropractor" comes to ensure the quality of teachers' curriculum. Codell believes the meeting devolves into a contest to see how similar every teacher's lesson plans can be. Conformity is the focus of the meeting, rather than originality. Always a nonconformist, Codell asks whether they can fudge their lesson plans to resemble accepted curriculum and then veer from those plans. In Codell's opinion, curriculum conformity can either lead to ingenuity on the part of good teachers who know when to adapt curriculum to their needs, and it can also lead to mediocrity when bad teachers too heavily rely on the curriculum. Codell ends with a poem she wrote on the subject, "How To Teach Learning."

April 7: Codell has won the Dr. Peggy Williams award for outstanding new Language Arts teacher. It will provide a small amount of money,...
(read more)