Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="faulkton" data-source="post: 2786947" data-attributes="member: 561910">Mr. Esquith, in all his glory, still makes mistakes. However, his are admirable mistakes, the best kind to make. He works too hard and he cares too much. He sacrifices his health for his students. He goes into debt buying educational supplies and taking children on long and expensive trips. He even works second and third jobs to bring in more money. He becomes careless and by some accounts endangers children in the process. He has a tough time learning his personal limits mentally, physically and financially. Pushing himself too hard culminates when he is hospitalized and is forced to leave a group of children alone on a camping trip. After being stabilized in the emergency room, he sneaks out of the hospital and returns to the kids in the woods. With this experience comes the realization that he cannot push himself to the point of compromising his ultimate goal. Mr. Esquith realizes that not recognizing the limits of human possibility is detrimental to his ultimate purpose, and that it is to the benefit of his students if he sets realistic limits for himself.Mr. Esquith is also guilty of being too judgmental of the perceived mistakes his students are making. This lesson comes at a painful price personally. But ultimately he learns that he can only provide opportunities he believes will be beneficial to his pupils. If they choose another path, even if he thinks they are in err, he must respect their choices and continue to be supportive of them should they choose to seek his counsel at some later time. Each life is a personal journey and to fully realize his intended outcome he sometimes must just sit back and allow people to choose their own path.Throughout the book Mr. Esquith compares his outlook with literary characters. He takes on differing literary personas at differing stages in his career. Early on he compares himself to Roy Hobbs in The Natural. Roy wants to be recognized as the best ball player in the world when he walks down the street. Early in his career Mr. Esquith claims to be motivated in the same way. He says that his strive for excellence and determination is fed ultimately by recognition. Even when he disavows the Roy Hobbs paradigm in favor of Huck Finn, there is truth to be found in his earliest comparison.The Huck Finn paradigm represents the middle portion of his career. He feels betrayed by an unjust system and society; he commits to flipping-the-bird at the entire system and rejects the whole **** thing with adversarial delight. He will set out in uncharted territory and live by his principles; if anyone wants to join him they are welcome. Rafe realizes the brashness of this approach when he hurts the feelings of an innocent student. The connection between the events described and his paradigm shift isn’t made explicitly clear, but from this incident he evolves from a Huck Finn outlook to one modeled after Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mocking Bird.Atticus knows he is fighting a losing battle, but that is irrelevant. He must go into the courtroom and fight the battle the best that he can. He must be true to himself and continues fighting what he knows is a losing battle for no other reason than to be true to the ideals and principles that he lives by. It doesn’t matter if the odds are against him and it does no good to get angry and reject everything. Those are self defeating attitudes that are detrimental to his stated purpose. The Atticus Finch paradigm is instrumental in dealing with conflict from this point on. No longer will he be so easily infuriated with limitations and restriction placed in his way by the bureaucracy and society. If he wants to instill humanity, manners, and respect in his children he must do it by example, as distasteful as that might be at times.Mr. Esquith provides no shortage of the problems facing some of our schools. The book is filled with the many obstacles and challenges that he has faced through his years in the classroom. From unwavering bureaucrats and bureaucratic policies, the incompetent teachers that they hire, and the competent ones they chase away, there is no shortage of the evils lurking within the educational system. The text is peppered with depressing tales of artificial barriers created in the educational process. Special attention is given to the negative contributions that the union makes. While he proclaims a need for union representation, he is critical of the effects that this has on the teaching system. Much like with compromise, Mr. Esquith sees unions as a necessary evil.We are presented with a seemingly endless supply of villains and barriers. Heroes and successes, beyond Mr. Esquith, are much harder to find. Almost instantly we come to realize that the author is a remarkable man and deserves much respect for his determination and hard work. Mr. Esquith has indeed won many teaching honors and awards, and the great feats he has personally accomplished should not be diminished. But what is there to offer us in the way of applicable macro level solutions? Beyond his exercise in economics, we find little. Looking further at his economic program, if it was systemized and developed into an educational seminar for staff development, it would become the exact thing that Mr. Esquith would encourage educators to skip. There seems to be little except to raise everyone to his standards; while quite admirable, this doesn’t seem to be a realistic solution to the multitude of problems presented by Mr. Esquith.So what we are left is the memoir of a legend, written emphasizing his great deeds and accomplishments. Enjoyable and humorous as it might be, what is offered to us is not a solution as much as it is a Christ like model. While devotion and good intentions are nice things to emulate, how many of us are ready to follow the example at the same expense? If correcting the problems outlined by Mr. Esquith is dependant upon populating the teaching profession with people as devoted, self-sacrificing, and as strong as Mr. Esquith himself, we are indeed in trouble.Pointing to the extreme gap that exist between the model provided and what is offered in reality, does not discount the importance of having admirable role models. Indeed we need great figures to set examples. It is clear that Mr. Esquith is indeed a great example to follow, and the teaching profession would clearly benefit from more people as admirable and dedicated as Mr. Esquith. Nonetheless, when bombarded with tale after tale of the great accomplishments and sacrifices made by the accomplisher himself, one is left with a feeling of smug arrogance and superiority. Perhaps Mr. Esquith’s disavowal of Roy Hobbs wasn’t entirely genuine.</blockquote>

Verification

Top

What's new

Forum list