I Have One Student by Mary Ellen Redmond

There’s a lot to love in I Have One Student. First, of course, the poems themselves, each a compelling glimpse into the experiences of an educator who devoted most of her life and all of her heart to her students. I am struck by how these poems blend such beautiful imagery with the ugliness that children face in this dangerous world. And they immerse me again in what it’s like to teach in the public school system: what a balancing act that is, between self-preservation and the enormous and endless effort to educate, protect, and nurture every single student in the room.But what I love most about Redmond’s work is her restraint. How she has resisted sentimentality … along with the urge to rant or preach or blame. Instead, she simply, elegantly, movingly conveys what she herself learned as a teacher: that doing right by her students meant seeing them clearly, with both compassion and honesty. Recognizing each of them as an individual … as the “one student” for whom she got up every morning, gathered herself, and went to work.

–Lauren Wolk is the New York Times bestselling and Newbery Honor-winning author of Wolf Hollow, Beyond the Bright Sea, Echo Mountain, My Own Lightning, and Candle Island. She is also a published poet, visual artist, and filmmaker.

This book is a love letter to teachers. Every poem either brought back a memory from my own classroom of a specific student, or a specific event, or reminded me of an old poem I wrote, or one I should have written, or (worst of all) a poem I now can no longer write because Mary Ellen Redmond beat me to it.”

–Taylor Mali, author of What Teachers Make