Rafe Esquith Quotes

“To quote the exceptional teacher Marva Collins, "I will is more important than IQ." 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. Discipline, hard work, perserverance, and generosity of spirit are, in the final analysis, far more important.”

— Rafe Esquith

“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.
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.
However, if you care about what you're doing, it's one of the toughest jobs around.”

— Rafe Esquith

Never compare one student's test score to another's. Always measure a child's progress against her past performance. There will always be a better reader, mathematician, or baseball player. 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.

— Rafe Esquith

“Most of us have participated in the trust exercise in which one person falls back and is caught by a peer. Even if the catch is made a hundred times in a row, the trust is broken forever if the friend lets you fall the next time as a joke. Even if he swears he is sorry and will never let you fall again, you can never fall back without a seed of doubt.”

— Rafe Esquith

“Most children, even very bright ones, need constant review and practice to truly own a concept in grammar, math or science. In schools today, on paper it may appear that kids are learning skills, but in reality they are only renting them, soon to forget what they've learned over the weekend or summer vacation.”

— Rafe Esquith

“That's the beauty of art
we strive for perfection but never achieve it. The journey is everything.”

— Rafe Esquith

“There are so many charlatans in the world of education. They teach for a couple of years, come up with a few clever slogans, build their websites, and hit the lecture circuit. In this fast-food-society, simple solutions to complex problems are embraced far too often. We can do better. I hope that people who read this book realize that true excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and enormous amounts of effort. After all, there are no shortcuts.”

— Rafe Esquith

“These days, many well-meaning school districts bring together teachers, coaches, curriculum supervisors, and a cast of thousands to determine what skills your child needs to be successful. Once these "standards" have been established, pacing plans are then drawn up to make sure that each particular skill is taught at the same rate and in the same way to all children. This is, of course, absurd. It gets even worse when one considers the very real fact that nothing of value is learned permanently by a child in a day or two.”

— Rafe Esquith

I want my students to love to read. Reading is not a subject. Reading is a foundation of life, an activity that people who are engaged with the world do all the time

— Rafe Esquith

“With better vision, we sacrifice for students for whom that sacrifice will most likely pay off. I'm sorry to say this, but there are times when even superhuman effort will not save a child from his environment or himself. It's not the job of the teacher to save a child's soul; it is the teachers' job to provide an opportunity for the child to save his own soul.”

— Rafe Esquith

“The reason I love teaching, it's like being a miner. I find all these undiscovered jewels and, with the right motivation, they're amazed at what they can do. I have to show them their capability.”

— Rafe Esquith

I want my kids to know that they're just as good and just as American as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or Dr. Martin Luther King. My worst fear is they will become ordinary.

— Rafe Esquith

“I am asking teachers to understand that we must make the education relevant for the children. If they're only working for the tests or they're only working to please us, they're not going to be interested in school.”

— Rafe Esquith

“I don't think we expect enough of students. They just need someone to show them the way.”

— Rafe Esquith

“Teach like your hair's on fire!”

— Rafe Esquith

“I try to show the children how every lesson I teach them is going to be something they use in their real life. That's why my kids work so hard, not because I'm so cool. They're working for themselves.”

— Rafe Esquith

“But to paraphrase Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind, ignorance and mediocrity are forever busy, and the forces of mediocrity aren't content with being mediocre; they'll do everything in their power to prevent even the humblest of teachers and children from accomplishing anything extraordinary. For good work shines a light on the failures of the mediocre, and that is a light which terrifies those who conspire to keep our nation's children, like themselves, ordinary.”

— Rafe Esquith

“When the kids see the poverty in their neighborhood, but they see these successful kids who come from the countries they come from, come from Mexico, come from Korea, come from the Philippines, come from Salvador, and were doing really well, it motivates them to do better. The former students give them a vision of what's possible.”

— Rafe Esquith

“There's a difference between logic and what maybe people see when they're presented evidence and justice and that they're not always together.”

— Rafe Esquith

“You hear terrible stories because there'll be a story about some terrible kid, but most of the kids I work with are terrific kids. They're poor, maybe their families are broken, so they're not coming home to a mom and dad and a nice dinner every night. But these kids are capable.”

— Rafe Esquith

“I love Shakespeare. In Shakespeare, tragedy is not just something that's bad. It's something that could be good and is bad.”

— Rafe Esquith

“I travel a lot with my students. We go on the road and even learn about things like doing your laundry and managing your time. And maybe that's not on the test at the end of the year, but it's in the test of life and that's why my classroom is successful.”

— Rafe Esquith

“Kids still like to laugh, kids still like the joy of learning. When you have a cool science experiment, I don't care where you're from. When you have that aha moment, whether you're in China or Kenya, that kid's eyes are gonna open up. So I really try to focus more on what we have in common than what differs us.”

— Rafe Esquith

“Good teachers are an endangered species because they're giving up because of the tests and everything.”

— Rafe Esquith

When I have children that go home and mom and dad are not home because they're working, they're trying to get food on the table, and they come home to an empty house and they go to sleep in an empty house, there is no way that child can compete against a child from the west side of Los Angeles who both parents went to Stanford. Well, good for them, God love them. That's not an equal playing field.

— Rafe Esquith

“Baseball is a religion in my classroom. It's a very important part of life, baseball.”

— Rafe Esquith

I always tell the kids that excellence is like pregnancy. You can't be a little bit pregnant. You either are or you're not.

— Rafe Esquith

“I have students who are PhDs in music who come back and scored the music and teach the kids the instruments that I don't know how to play. Those are the points of light, the former students.”

— Rafe Esquith

“One of the funny things about the racism of the system, when I started 30 years ago, I'm in an area called Koreatown and most of the kids were Asian. And when the kids did well, people said, "Well, of course, they did well. They're Asians." But when we had this huge influx of Latino children from Central America, they said, "Oh, you're gonna have problems now."”

— Rafe Esquith