Madame Esmé: A Review

Esmé Codell doesn't think her interview went well and is surprised when she is hired to teach at a newly constructed school. She answered the interviewer's questions honestly, not wrapped in pretty packages like most education graduates do. On the first day of school, she walks in confident that she has the ability to teach. Leaving nothing in her classroom to chance, she takes charge of her assignment and meets each obstacle with both stamina and grace. Stamina as she breaks up fights the principal watches from his office window, and grace as she waltzes through literature feeding the hungry. Throughout she fights to do what she was trained to do, teach. Not as a robot programmed in the newest pedagogy, but as a teacher, an actress, a mother, a witch, a policeman, a bouncer, a social worker, a baby-sitter, a cheerleader, and a vulnerable human being.

Lessons gleaned from an education rich in the arts are at the core of her courage and determination. On July 7, she writes, "How will I ever accomplish what I set out to do, what I imagine? Then I think of the past before I was born, the great small feats people accomplished. I think of things like Mary Martin washing her hair onstage in South Pacific, or the Kungsholm puppet operas with sixty puppets onstage at once, or the palace built by the postman in France, or the circus I saw in Copenhagen where a woman wore a coat of live minks, or any of the things I enjoy and value, and I think: Those people had to work to accomplish those things, they thought of details, they followed through.... The goal is not necessarily to succeed but to keep trying to be the kind of person who has ideas and sees them through. We'll see. I aim too high, probably. But if I don't aim, how will I hit anywhere near the target?"

On the first day of school, Ms. Codell notices the bullet-riddled windows in her classroom have not been replaced. This shattered glass greeted thirty-one children on their first day of fifth grade. This is what Madame Esmé left after three years, not because her students' problems were insurmountable, but because she could not endure an administration blinded by ego. Three years later she sits in the auditorium of her old school watching her first class, now eighth graders, graduate. She finds only sixteen of her thirty-one charges on stage. She recounts, "Do they dress up like this everywhere when children graduate eighth grade? Look at the floral arrangements some parents have brought. Look at the cops outside

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