Ms. Jenny Eskin to Retire after 34 Years at Riverdale

Ms. Jenny Eskin, whose classroom style is at once no-nonsense and intimate, will retire this month after 34 years teaching history at Riverdale. 

Ms. Eskin’s preference for a receptive audience informed her choice to teach high school. “I like teenagers because they are accustomed to being told that they’re wrong. They don’t recoil; they see an invitation to dig in deeper and learn more. And they hear a teacher’s correction as a real act of investing in them,” she said. 

Ms. Eskin’s directness is a large part of the “experience” of being her student, but a teacher does not necessarily need a distinctive personality to be effective, Ms. Eskin explained. 

“Students need to be able to read the teacher. Riverdale students are flexible. They can learn from different teaching styles. They can learn from different personalities, but they need consistency. And I do think that all of my students would agree, if you ask them, that I have a consistent personality,” she said. 

By her singular approach, Ms. Eskin is among the cadre of Riverdale teachers with a troop of devotees. “I see a whole lot of happy cults at Riverdale, a whole lot of teachers whose students trust the process of learning from them,” she said. 

  But being charming is not a teacher’s most important responsibility, Ms. Eskin said. “A teacher doesn’t need to win kids over; a teacher needs to figure out how to meet kids where they are.”

Central to Ms. Eskin’s consistent personality is her well-publicized love of cats. Yet, Ms. Eskin is momentarily without a four-pawed companion, an absence she attributed to competing plans for the near-term. “I love living in a 100-year-old building, but I need to do some work in my apartment,” she said. “So I can’t have a feline friend for a few years. But I have decided, when I get one, I want a Siamese. I think they’re just mystically beautiful.” 

Although Ms. Eskin has breed-specific criteria for selecting her retirement cat, she remains committed to the welfare of her feline neighbors, regardless of their fur’s pattern. “I know that it is important not to seek out a specific specific breed. But I did feed feral cats for two years, and I’ve decided that will offset my seeking a Siamese,” Ms. Eskin said. 

In the classroom, Ms. Eskin is neither moralizing or unsentimental. Likewise, Ms. Eskin described becoming a teacher to pursue the work that interested her, not out of a desire to practice a noble profession. “I didn’t choose to be a teacher because I wanted to give to other people. I chose to teach because of the kind of life that I wanted to live,” Ms. Eskin said.

Ms. Eskin encouraged her students to revel in the pleasures education can offer them for perpetuity. “A liberal education gives you somebody to talk to when you’re by yourself,” she said. “You can have a conversation about something meaningful in your own mind when you carry a liberal-arts education throughout your life.”

Constantly engaging and adoring on her own terms, Riverdale’s resident cat has indeed provided her students with much material for their internal conversations.