Rafe Esquith - There Are No Shortcuts

Acclaim for Rafe Esquith and

Politicians, burbling over how to educate the underclass, would do well to stop by Rafe Esquiths 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

Rafe Esquith is my only hero.

Sir Ian McKellen

For ten hours each day, Esquith and his fifth-graders are holed up in their cramped classroom, immersed in a world of Shakespearean plays and algebraic equations, of classical music and fine literaturea far cry from the gritty world outside the schoolyards chain-link fence.

Los Angeles Times

What this group of students and their remarkable teacher are proving is that kids with no secure homes and no secure future can learn to hope and to become first-class citizens. If theres anything more important than that, please tell me what it is.

Hal Holbrook

Passionate and inspiring. With anecdotes that are alternately amusing and disheartening, Esquith details the joys and frustrations of teaching and offers valuable insights to parents and teachers alike.

Booklist

Any teacher, parent or reader who cares about education in this country and who takes the time to read and synthesize Esquiths ideas will be rewarded.

Anniston Star

Upbeat [and] witty. Part memoir, part manual, but primarily a call for action.

Publishers Weekly

RAFE ESQUITH
THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS

Rafe Esquith has taught at Hobart Elementary School in Los Angeles for nineteen years. He is the product of the Los Angeles public schools and a graduate of UCLA. His many honors and awards include a National Medal of the Arts, the 1992 Disney National Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award, a Sigma Beta Delta Fellowship from Johns Hopkins University, Parents magazines As You Grow Award, Oprah Winfreys Use Your Life Award, and an MBE from Queen Elizabeth. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Barbara Tong.

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MAY 2004

Copyright 2003 by Rafe Esquith

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.

Anchor Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Although this book is based on true incidents, times have been changed, places moved, and events combined to make certain points clearer. Except for myself and my wife, Barbara, the characters in this book are composite figures. Any attempt by persons to identify themselves would be pointless, as the people in this book represent types, and are not individual figures. The villain in our schools today is the system itself, not the people who attempt to work within the system.

Permissions acknowledgments appear on .

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Esquith, Rafe.
There are no shortcuts / Rafe Esquith.
p. cm.
1. Esquith, Rafe. 2. TeachersCaliforniaLos AngelesBiography.
3. Motivation in education. I. Title.
LA2317.E78 A3 2003
372.110092dc21 2002075961

eISBN: 978-0-307-49180-0

Author photograph Peter Thomas/Dunlap-Turney Studio

www.anchorbooks.com

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For my parents,
Joseph and Claire,
who never saw me teach,
And Barbara.

In the clearing stands a boxer

And a fighter by his trade

And he carries the reminders

Of every glove that laid him down

Or cut him till he cried out,

In his anger and his shame:

I am leaving I am leaving

But the fighter still remains.

PAUL SIMON

M y father was a boxer. He fought almost a hundred amateur bouts and two professional ones. My mother made him quit the ring, but he was always a boxer. In 1948 he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. They couldnt knock him downhe told them nothing, and they never laid a glove on him; he always answered the bell. Even on his deathbed, heavily medicated to kill the pain from cancer, the forty-eight-year-old social worker kept asking his nurses, May I help you?

My mother raised me to help others. Thats why I teach.

We teachers are all boxers. We get hit a lot. Ive been knocked down so many times Im often woozy.

But Ive learned something in my first nineteen years in the classroom: all teachers, even the best ones, get knocked down. The difference between the best ones and the others is that the best ones always get up to answer the bell.

May you always get up. It is a child ringing the bell, and he needs your help.

I ts dangerous to think too much about public education. So many things are wrong with it that its easier simply to go on a search-and-destroy mission and write only about the horror of it all. Those of us who have survived school have plenty of scars. Any person who has taught for more than a few years has met administrators, teachers, parents, and children who, as Mark Twain once remarked, make a body ashamed of the human race.

Thats not my mission here. More than anything else, this book is meant to be a reminder of what public education can be. But to understand where we might consider going, it becomes painfully necessary to examine some things that we usually try to avoid.

I have one more objective, too: I want to give hope to young teachers who would like to run against the wind but are afraid of the consequences. I am living proof that you can have success as a teacher despite the many forces that are working against you. Like the Founding Fathers, I am a lover of independence, and freethinkers are not popular in public schools today. Instead, as public schools fail, bureaucrats are attempting to solve serious problems with simplistic solutions. Theyre afraid to examine the real reasons why our schools are failing, so they use fashionable words or pretty new textbooks to try and solve the very real problems that are destroying our classrooms. Poverty, greed, and incompetent teaching are just some of the reasons why Johnny not only cant read but has no interest in reading. Using a new reading series or changing the classroom environment isnt going to solve our problems. Most tragic of all, many districts are trying to take charge of education by forcing all teachers to use uniform lesson plans, by which all students will be guided in the same way at the same pace. This may be a comfort to young teachers who arent sure what to do every day, but I already know the inevitable result of uniform teaching: things will continue to be uniformly terrible.

Ive never been one of the masses, either as a parent or as a teacher. I will not let advertisers persuade me to see mediocre movies, and I do not watch a television show in order to converse with peers about it the following day. My life is my own. I dont feel I have to buy in to the popular culture in order to be a successful teacher, parent, or person. But there are those to whom fitting in with the majority is important, and I have respect for that path; its just not the one I can follow, and these people may find the lessons Ive learned irrelevant for their journey.