An open air stairway leads to Room 56 at Hobart Elementary, one in a row of matched doors extending down a outdoor corridor, all marked with a sign ‘Fire Extinguisher Inside’ in red letters. But behind this door a fire bursts with the flashing energy of 30 fifth graders inspired and supported by their teacher Rafe Esquith, who over a 20-year career has recast the way we educate children. The author of ‘There Are No Shortcuts,’ he will share his philosophy and introduce several of his students on Tuesday, May 25, 7:30 p.m. at Village Books. The walls, decorated with university banners from Harvard, Stanford, UCSD and Santa Monica College, speak of goals and triumphs of graduates, who were once in this fifth-grade classroom. The blackboard is crowned with a banner announcing a bold, brave philosophy: ‘There Are No Shortcuts,’ quite a challenge in this era when rigor and stick-to-itiveness have become orphaned words. On this afternoon, a small rock band is rehearsing ‘Hamlet.’ The vocalists quietly sing ‘Paint It Black,’ the Rolling Stones’ 1996 song of disillusionment (‘I see a red door and I want it painted black. No colors any more I want them to turn black.’) while 10-year-old ‘Hamlet’ recites his own despair (‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.’) This group of Latino and Asian children are not geniuses, just kids, many from below the poverty line, who are learning to think in a school environment based on responsibility and trust instead of fear. ‘The kids at this school are hungry and angry that they don’t get the same opportunities as other kids,’ says Esquith, who despite being a winner of the Disney National Outstanding Teacher of the Year award and a recipient of constant invitations to teach at more prestigious schools, says his style is perfectly matched to these students. ‘I mine for these unpolished jewels, and I like showing them the way out,’ he says. Hobart is a year-round school with an enrollment of 2,300 students, the majority of whom speak English as their second language. And yet, Esquith’s fifth graders understand and compute mathematics, read Mark Twain and ‘Bury Me at Wounded Knee’ and score in the country’s top 10 percent on standardized tests. Esquith’s technique? No magic, no cash rewards, just a couple of basic tenets. ‘I stick with it, just by being stubborn you get good at stuff,’ says Esquith, 49, who has been at Hobart for 20 years. ‘You stay focused on the task and be the best you can be.’ His students work hard. Many are in the classroom at 6:30 a.m. for math team, stay in at lunch to learn guitar and stay after school, voluntarily. Each year, the Hobart Shakespeareans, as his students are known, perform one of Shakespeare’s plays, which they chose at the beginning of the school year. They have performed for such classical actors and patrons as Sir Ian McKellen and Hal Holbrook. On the day I visited, the students in his class were ‘off track’ but showed up in Esquith’s classroom, some practicing ‘Hamlet’ for an upcoming performance at the Mark Taper Forum, promoting the NEA’s mission to perform Shakespeare in schools throughout the country. Other students were designing their own Mondrian-like paintings; some were working on their own short story, and still others were running laps and climbing stairs to shape up for the upcoming class trip to the Southwest. In reading Esquith’s book ‘There are No Shortcuts,’ you might dismiss this teacher as extraordinary and that’s wonderful, but what about the average person who may not have10 hours a day to dedicate, including Saturdays, or finds Shakespeare daunting? Esquith’s advice is both philosophical and specific. He says that even a teacher who cares about children and learning may find his priorities buried under the exigencies of a large bureaucracy such as LAUSD. ‘The district is so overwhelming that it can crush the human spirit,’ says Esquith, who has had his fair share of tangles with the district and administrators, but learned to pick his battles, and more importantly learned to take short vacations away from the job. ‘Don’t forget who you are. You are talented and you have passions. Don’t ignore the district, but find a passion and do something you passionately love in the classroom, whether you’re a great cook, great gardener. It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s my guy. I have a friend, another teacher, who asked me if he could rewire my classroom, He loves all things electric. That’s his passion.’ (Room 56 is custom-equipped with theatrical track lighting, computer hookups and electronic music outlets.) On the practical side, Esquith advises teachers to manage their classroom from the beginning. ‘If you don’t, nothing will happen.’ But, he adds there are two emotions that can dominate the teacher-student relationship: fear’fear of the teacher, fear of parents, fear of one another’or trust. ‘I give them my trust. I tell them you can screw up on your homework, you can even hit each other, these things are fixable, but break my trust, it’s over.’ Esquith grew up in Los Angeles; his father was a social worker, his mother was the activist in the family. He’s a product of Los Angeles public schools and UCLA but credits his wife Barbara with the good manners, kindness and respect the children show for one another, for him and for visitors. ‘Everything you saw here today was Barbara. She says, the kids don’t have to go to Stanford; what difference does it make if they score 100 percent on a test if they’re not good people?’ Rafe and Barbara raised four adult children, who are launched, albeit not in education. Esquith thought he’d teach math, but happily landed in fifth grade, which he considers, along with first grade, the most important in elementary school. ‘Fifth graders are old enough to do extraordinary things, but because their hormones haven’t kicked in they are really very sweet. The important thing is that this is their first view of the future; they are about to start the toughest years of their life, when American culture bombards them with bad messages constantly. I am trying to give them armor to shield them against what they’re up against.’ According to Esquith the biggest challenge is making sure that his students are not just ordinary, particularly in an educational climate that doesn’t demand very much. ‘Our standards in public schools are incredibly low,’ he says. ‘Successful classrooms are run by teachers who have an unshakable belief that the students can accomplish amazing things and who create the expectation that they will.’
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