Product Description

From one of America’s most celebrated educators, an inspiring guide to transforming every child’s education

In a Los Angeles neighborhood plagued by guns, gangs, and drugs, there is an exceptional classroom known as Room 56. The fifth graders inside are first-generation immigrants who live in poverty and speak English as a second language. They also play Vivaldi, perform Shakespeare, score in the top 1 percent on standardized tests, and go on to attend Ivy League universities. Rafe Esquith is the teacher responsible for these accomplishments.

From the man whom The New York Times calls "a genius and a saint" comes a revelatory program for educating today’s youth. In Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire!, Rafe Esquith reveals the techniques that have made him one of the most acclaimed educators of our time. The two mottoes in Esquith’s classroom are "Be Nice, Work Hard," and "There Are No Shortcuts." His students voluntarily come to school at 6:30 in the morning and work until 5:00 in the afternoon. They learn to handle money responsibly, tackle algebra, and travel the country to study history. They pair Hamlet with rock and roll, and read the American classics. Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire! is a brilliant and inspiring road map for parents, teachers, and anyone who cares about the future success of our nation’s children.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6288 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Esquith might be the only public school teacher to be honored by both Oprah Winfrey and the Dalai Lama; he is the only school teacher ever to receive the president's National Medal of the Arts. For the past 25 years, Esquith has taught fifth graders at Hobart Elementary in central Los Angeles. Like most progressive educators, Esquith is outraged by the tyranny of testing, the scripting of teaching under "No Child Left Behind" and the overwhelming bureaucratization of the education industry. Still, he's done wonders with the basic curriculum—developing a hands-on arts program, a money-management curriculum and a sports-based statistics unit. Esquith and his Hobart Shakespeareans are world famous for the rock opera they create every year. Throughout each school day, Esquith teaches life skills: how to think about problems, how to plan a strategy to solve them and, most important, how to work together and be nice to each other. While his goals are inspiring, he's also practical—most chapters include affordable, how-to directions for a variety of his most effective classroom activities; he's even got a few tips for revamping those inescapable "test prep" sessions. (Jan.)
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From the Back Cover
Praise for Rafe Esquith:

"Rafe Esquith is my only hero."
—Sir Ian McKellan

"Politicians, burbling over how to educate the underclass, would do well to stop by Rafe Esquith’s fifth grade class as it mounts its annual Shakespeare play. Sound like a grind? Listen to the peals of laughter bouncing off the classroom walls."
—Time

"Esquith is a modern-day Thoreau, preaching the value of good work, honest self-reflection, and the courage to go one’s own way."
—Newsday

About the Author
Rafe Esquith has taught at Hobart Elementary in Los Angeles for twenty-two years. He is the only teacher to be awarded the president’s National Medal of the Arts.

Customer Reviews

A Book of Inspiration and Ideas from the "Hobart Shakespeareans" Teacher
During our teaching careers, most of us have experienced a few "Ah-ha" moments. For Rafe Esquith, his wake-up call was literally when his hair caught on fire during a science experiment. Why was he the last one in the class to realize his head was ablaze - because he had inadvertently reached classroom nirvana.

I think of it as being in the zone, Esquith labels it "ignoring the crap," either way, this gifted teacher had a transcendental moment that altered his educational philosophy forever and his influence is rapidly spreading into classrooms across the globe. Part quixotic and possibly part "mad," he has transformed his 5th grade class, of mainly ESL students, into Shakespeare-quoting individuals who have learned how to take charge of their own learning.

Esquith's book challenges such issues as the obsession with high-stakes testing, unresponsive administrators, ineffective professional development opportunities, and the "demons" that take away our energy and spirit. At the heart of his "cookbook" is getting students to take responsibility for their actions and to value failure as an integral part of the learning process.

Check out this book because it explores the realities of teaching difficult students, as opposed to your typical educational log of impractical theories. Pick up this book if you agree with his classroom motto of, "Be nice, work hard. There are no shortcuts." Finally, purchase this book if the biggest fear for your students is that they become ordinary.

Lastly, what really motivated me to buy this book was that Esquith hasn't been lured out of the classroom. Instead, he continues to embrace his mission of finding the different keys it takes to ignite each of his students.

Michael James D'Amato, author of "The Classroom"

Loved this book, moved by this book
I'm a teacher at a public continuation high school in California. I heard about this book on my afternoon commute home listening to NPR. I'm always looking for material to inspire me to become a better teacher. Liking what I heard on the radio, I ordered the book. I was not dissapointed. I resonate with Rafe's passion for teaching and I found many useful ideas in this book even though the students I teach are at the end of their public school journey and his are in the fifth grade. I would recomment this book to any teacher or parent who wants to light their little ones' hearts on fire with a love of learning. His enthusiasm is contagious and is a wonderful "shot in the arm" to any teacher who is struggling in the trenches. I found Mr. Esquith's writing to be upbeat, informative, and when there was blame, it was evenly spread amongst the government, administrators, teachers, and parents-- all whom have a say in how our kids are educated. California is inundated with English learners, yet this book touts a "no holds barred" strategy for having all our kids striving for excellence: no excuses! And he's right in claiming to be "an actual teacher." Many pundits hit the road with their book, abandoning the field to hawk their book and theories, not so with this teacher apparently. You can still find him in room 56. Thanks. Mahalo. I mean it. Two thumbs up. Rock on! Garth.

He Lives to Teach - I Teach to Live
Like most people who read this book, I am a teacher, and I happen to work in the same school district as Mr. Esquith, the infamous Los Angeles Unified School District. Pretty much everything Mr. Esquith says about the district's dysfunction is, in my opinion, true. That aside, however, Mr. Esquith has written a book about how to be the sort of teacher that most sane people don't want to be.

Mr. Esquith, by his own admission, spends twelve hours a day, six days a week, forty-eight weeks a year, with his students. The other four weeks he takes them on the road to places like Mount Rushmore, Washington, D.C., Yellowstone National Park, the Ashland Shakespeare Festival, and a number of other places. By my standards, Mr. Esquith "has a screw loose." He spends infinitely more waking time with his students than he does with his own family, and his students spend infinitely more of their waking time with him than they do with their parents. I have a problem with that - it seems completely inappropriate on any number of levels, and I wonder if in the long run it is really good for the students.

I enjoy teaching (seventh-grade social studies), and do the best I can. However, when my work-day is done I go home to this thing called my life. If I kept Mr. Esquith's hours, my wife would, she told me, divorce me. My friends would never see me. I would never make new friends except in the context of my teaching. In other words, my life would be thrown completely out of balance, as is Mr. Esquith's.

While new teachers will perhaps be inspired by Mr. Esquith's heroics, they should ask themselves if they plan on following Mr. Esquith's path. Veteran teachers like myself will probably not benefit much from this book. We'll be too busy wondering why on earth Mr. Esquith would want to spend so much of his time with other people's ten-year-olds. This is not sour grapes. What I do as a teacher would not work for Mr. Esquith. What Mr. Esquith does as a teacher would not work for the vast majority of those in the teaching profession.

Perhaps, as The New York Times says, Rafe Esquith is a genius and a saint. All I know is that I prefer my life to the one he represents as his.