I’ve been buying and reading books on pedagogy this summer, and one I bought was Rafe Esquith’s Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56. Esquith is all the rage: after all, how many fifth grade teachers do Shakespeare with students after class?

There are some good ideas in there, and initially I was hopeful that it would be a useful book. His discussion of the importance of trust in the classroom and some ideas of how to integrate that into a classroom management plan excited me, as this was something I was hoping to focus on this year.

Soon, though, some things started to feel off. Discussing the fact that educators are role models, Esquith writes,

Some of my students laugh bitterly at a teacher they once had. They discuss her in the most unflattering of terms. She often comes to school late. [… She] talks on her cell phone constantly. Even when the kids are being taken somewhere, their fearless leader walks in front of them gabbing on the phone. […] The same teacher thinks she is “secretly” shopping online while the kids do their science assignments. She believes the kids do not know what she is doing. She is very much mistaken. (10)

My initial reaction: what an awful teacher. My second, more thoughtful reaction: how in the world does Esquith know this? Certainly, a teacher can overhear students talking in class about a teacher they had, but if the conversation continues long enough for the teacher to garner this much information, one of two things is happening:

  1. These kids aren’t working but sitting in class having free time, which they’re using to gossip about another teacher; or,
  2. Esquith discusses other teachers with his classes.

Neither one of these is terribly flattering. The passage in the book is terribly unprofessional.

One passages deserves to be quoted at length:

You see, the children at our school do not read well. They do not like to read. As of this writing, 78 percent of the Latino children on our campus are not proficient in reading, according to our state’s standardized tests. This means one of two things: Either we have the stupidest kids on the planet , or we are failing these children. Please believe me when I tell you that the vast majority of our students are perfectly capable of learning to read. No one wants to admit it, but a systemic conspiracy of mediocrity keeps these children on the treadmill of illiteracy.

To fight the problem, we now have “literacy coaches” at schools. Most of these “experts” are former classroom teachers who never accomplished much with their own students. […]

Teaching our children to read well and helping them develop a love of reading should be our top priorities. People seem to understand this. Millions are spent on books and other reading material, celebrities make public service announcements, and thousands of hours are spent training teachers. The spin doctors at various publish companies tell us that our students are doing better, but honest people know this is simply not the case. Concerned teachers have learned not to bother raising their voices, because powerful textbook companies have carefully prepared answers to anyone who points out that the emperor has no clothes. Young teachers are afraid of being crushed by bureaucrats whose only real mission is to keep selling their product. As testing services compete to rake in millions of dollars, nervous school districts anxiously await the latest test results. And year after year, most children do not become passionate lifelong readers.

It’s complicated. There is a lot of finger-pointing. But to borrow a phrase from another big, fat book that won a Pulitzer Prize, our children are victims of a sort of “confederacy of dunces.” Powerful forces of mediocrity have combined to prevent perfectly competent children from learning to love reading. These forces include television, video games, poor teaching, poverty, the breakup of the family, and a general lack of adult guidance. (29-31)

There is a lot of truth in the statement, Testing services do make a lot of money from the increasing number of standardized tests students have to take. There can be pressure to use state-funded textbooks regardless of a teacher’s preference. But the bottom line is this passage is highly insulting by presumptively marginalizing literacy coaches.

This book has some good ideas, but most of the time, I found myself thinking, “I’m glad I’m not this guy’s colleague!”

Still, listening to him on NPR, I sense a humility that just doesn’t come across in his writing, which is too bad.