The DHX: The Doughtie Houses Exchange

Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56 by Rafe Esquith

While it’s true kids don’t choose their stepparents, it’s also true that they also don’t choose their fifth grade teachers. That doesn’t stop Rafe Esquith.

Rafe Esquith teaches in an inner city school where the kids have rough backgrounds and lots of disadvantages — and he teaches there because he wants to. He loves his work. He loves helping kids connect with their own inner compasses, their own curiosity about the world, and their own potential. He teaches them systematically how to solve problems in a way that helps them not just with their math skills, but also with problems they run across in life. He teaches them about Lawrence Kohlberg’s six levels of moral development and encourages them all year long to think about what level they are working from. His kids perform real Shakespeare plays, his kids travel to Washington, D.C. and get compliments about how considerate they are, his kids play musical instruments, his kids come back over the years to sing to and help serve food to people down on their luck on Christmas Eve, and his kids do well academically. He’s always on the lookout for how he could be doing better — how he could revise his approach to get better results. He gives his kids the tools, the attention, and resources, and the lessons they need to make choices for the good in their own lives, even after they’ve left fifth grade.

He doesn’t reach every kid. But he reaches a lot. And he does it with a class full of kids in the period of just one school year. That inspires me as a stepmom. True, my stepkids didn’t choose me, but there’s a lot kids don’t choose in their own lives. And I chose them.

We have more power than we think.

* * * * *

A few favorite quotes:

• “[F]ailure can be part of the learning process.”
• “Never forget that the kids watch you constantly. They model themselves after you, and you have to be the person you want them to be.”
• “Failure happens only when students stop trying to solve a problem.”
• “Barbara, my brilliant wife, has a question she poses to all my students. We even call it ‘the Barbara question.’ It’s simple but profound: What will you do when things go wrong? Notice the question does not say if things go wrong. Things will go wrong. That’s a part of life. A person’s ability to answer that simple question can mean the difference between success and failure…”