Educating Esmé Theme

As Jean Piaget once said, “[t]he goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge, but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things”. Children have such a wealth of ideas inside of them, and the goal of every teacher, including myself, should be to inspire their students to share them with not only the class, but the world. In the novel Educating Esmé by Esmé Raji Codell, Esmé inspired her students to become lifelong learners through the promotion of goals for her students. One of the main themes of the student goals in the Intro to Education class is to inspire students to become good learners. Good learners typically have a high level of discipline and self …show more content…
Esmé decorated her classroom with detail, offered a multitude of activities for her students, and was always there for them. This set her students up to develop an understanding of new material and using it in the real world. By seeing that their teacher cared deeply for them, the students became more willing to share with her. One example of a student becoming more open was in December when Shira had heard “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”. Shira then “came out of a fetal position and started to dance in front of the whole class… She has not gone into a fetal position since and… is making all sorts of friends” (Codell, 2010, pp. 67-68). Additionally, by seeing high level of support paired with a high level of control, the students became more confident in themselves. That correlates with both the styles of parenting and teaching; by creating a more authoritative environment, the students could have had a better potential of becoming adjusted to the world. By creating a caring environment, Esmé is able to show her students how to trust her and one …show more content…
75). This correlates with the goals of students continuing to grow and expand as people, and the goal of being respectful and confident in themselves and others. Esmé’s students allow each other to experience the joys of the time machine both before and after they experience it themselves. Moreover, her students were beginning to learn in a more abstract manner. Esmé’s students had learned their alphabet and phonetics, a very concrete method of teaching, and in January were able to apply their knowledge to reading, the most abstract way of learning. Through the success of showing respect to their classmate’s experiences and , the students were later able to have more control over their own