Thinking Citizen Blog — Greatest Classroom Teacher That Almost No One Has Ever Heard Of — Rafe Esquith
Thinking Citizen Blog — Friday is Education and Education Policy Day
Today’s Topic — Greatest Classroom Teacher That Almost No One Has Ever Heard Of — Rafe Esquith, 5th grade, Hobart Elementary (1984–2015)
If you care about kids, read Rafe Esquith’s “Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire,” and “There are No Short Cuts.” And watch the documentary “The Hobart Shakespeareans.” I can’t possibly do them justice. After he became a best-selling author, he kept teaching in the same classroom at Hobart Elementary, the second-largest elementary school in the country, with a student body of poor, immigrant children, few of whom spoke English as a first language. By the end of fifth grade, Rafe’s students had learned to play the guitar or violin, had performed Shakespearean roles in the original Elizabethan English, and had absorbed the fundamental principles of managing money. Graduates of his fifth-grade classroom consistently scored in the top 5 to 10% on standardized tests despite an absolutely unconventional curriculum which put music and drama at its center. Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
COMPARING STUDENTS — TO WHOM?
1. “Never compare one student’s test score to another’s.”
2. “Always measure a child’s progress against her past performance.”
3. “There will always be a better reader, mathematician, or baseball player.”
NB: “Our goal is to help each student become as special as she can be as an individual — not to be more special than the kid sitting next to her.”
IQ VERSUS “I WILL”
1. “To quote the exceptional teacher Marva Collins, “I will is more important than IQ.”
2. “ It is wonderful to have a terrific mind, but it’s been my experience that having outstanding intelligence is a very small part of the total package that leads to success and happiness.”
3. “Discipline, hard work, perseverance, and generosity of spirit are, in the final analysis, far more important.”
TEACHING IS A GREAT GIG — well, really, it depends
1. “I’d like to give every young teacher some good news. Teaching is a very easy job. Administrators will tell you what to do. You’ll be given books and told chapters to assign the children. Veteran teachers will show you the correct way to fill out forms and have your classes line up.”
2. “And here’s some more good news. If you do all of these things badly, they let you keep doing it. You can go home at three o’clock every day. You get about three months off a year. Teaching is a great gig.”
3. “However, if you care about what you’re doing, it’s one of the toughest jobs around.”
NB: Rafe worked roughly 12 hours a day, six days a week. His students often showed up at 6:30 am and stay until 6:00 pm. They worked on vacations and holidays. But they loved it. As did he.
FINAL WORD: A witch hunt ended his career at Hobart prematurely. Doing the right thing for students can easily generate ill-will among colleagues and administrators. And however good a teacher you are not all students will love you. In the words of Jay Mathews, the Washington Post education correspondent, “Teachers that sacrifice are often unpopular in their districts because they make colleagues look lazy.” Esquith was fired in 2015. A settlement was reached in 2017 in which his full benefits were restored. (See final link for details.)
https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Like-Your-Hairs-Fire/dp/0143112864
EG4 Rafe Esquith and the Hobart Shakespeareans (10–94)
How Rafe Esquith Creates Student Buy-In | Teacher Tip Tuesday
Perspective | The story of a world-renowned teacher, accusations and a settlement
Last time: Fred Rogers (1928–2003). Next time: Marva Collins (1936–2015).
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned in the last week related to education or education policy. Or the coolest thought however half-baked you had. Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to education or education policy that the rest of us may have missed. Or just some random education-related fact that blew you away.
This is your chance to make some one’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something that is dear to your heart.
