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Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56 | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: Viking
Category: EBooks
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $4.01 (29%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  69 reviews
Sales Rank: 5060
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Dewey Decimal Number: 370.1
ASIN: B000OZ0NRG
Publication Date: March 28, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
In a Los Angeles neighborhood plagued by guns, gangs, and drugs, there is an exceptional classroom known as Room 56. The fifth graders inside are first-generation immigrants who live in poverty and speak English as a second language. They also play Vivaldi, perform Shakespeare, score in the top 1 percent on standardized tests, and go on to attend Ivy League universities. Rafe Esquith is the teacher responsible for these accomplishments. From the man whom The New York Times calls "a genius and a saint" comes a revelatory program for educating today's youth. In Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire!, Rafe Esquith reveals the techniques that have made him one of the most acclaimed educators of our time. The two mottoes in Esquith's classroom are "Be Nice, Work Hard" and "There Are No Shortcuts." His students voluntarily come to school at 6:30 in the morning and work until 5:00 in the afternoon. They learn to handle money responsibly, tackle algebra, and travel the country to study history. They pair Hamlet with rock and roll, and read the American classics. Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire! is a brilliant and inspiring road map for parents, teachers, and anyone who cares about the future success of our nation's children.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 64 more reviews...
 It's on my Wanted list for sure! September 21, 2008
I'll be honest, I haven't bought this book yet. As a Senior in College with loans and student teaching looming in the distance I just don't have the time to go buy this book and sit down and read it with the attention it deserves. But I want it so badly that it will be topping out my Christmas list before any of the new techno gadgets.
I saw it in the book store, and as I've seen a video in one of my classes about this teacher I picked it up. The title was interesting as well and I flipped it open to a random page to get a feel for it. I was hooked, and if my mom hadn't been in the store I would have spent the rest of my night standing over the display reading this book cover to cover. It doesn't matter if you're in the classroom yet or still working your way there, this is a must read!
A Great Book for Teachers and Teaching Students May 2, 2008
My name is Lydia and I read it as part of an assignment for my teaching education classes. I loved this book. Esquith makes the classroom come alive in real life and on paper and his rebuke of traditional teaching is swift and precise. His students are different and think about learning differently because he teaches differently. While his all out style is not for every teacher you can encorporate his passion and energy into any grade being taught. My favorite part is at the end when he aknowledges that sometimes he does let the stresses and difficulties of teaching his kids get to him. Every time that happens he goes back to one student who he really made a difference with and that student helps him regain his passion. The lesson for me is that if you can truly help one child learn in your classroom then it will always be worth the effort of teaching.
FANTASTIC source for ideas March 8, 2008
I picked this book up because I work with 4th-6th graders at an after school center. Regardless of if you are a teacher or not - if you work with children you MUST read this book. The tips, tricks, and ideas alone are priceless. I really admire that Rafe is a teacher and not just an educational theorist/researcher.
He reminds us that even though our school systems are getting more and more bureaucratic, we can still (and we must, really) strive to teach our students. He fights against complacency and disillusionment with his honest portrayal of education.
READ THIS!
Teach like your hair is on fire March 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is enjoyable and very easy reading. The stories are delightful, and there are great take-away lessons for teachers. The book is geared more for elementary school teachers, but as a high school teacher, I found it useful.
 He Lives to Teach - I Teach to Live March 4, 2008
21 out of 22 found this review helpful
Like most people who read this book, I am a teacher, and I happen to work in the same school district as Mr. Esquith, the infamous Los Angeles Unified School District. Pretty much everything Mr. Esquith says about the district's dysfunction is, in my opinion, true. That aside, however, Mr. Esquith has written a book about how to be the sort of teacher that most sane people don't want to be.
Mr. Esquith, by his own admission, spends twelve hours a day, six days a week, forty-eight weeks a year, with his students. The other four weeks he takes them on the road to places like Mount Rushmore, Washington, D.C., Yellowstone National Park, the Ashland Shakespeare Festival, and a number of other places. By my standards, Mr. Esquith "has a screw loose." He spends infinitely more waking time with his students than he does with his own family, and his students spend infinitely more of their waking time with him than they do with their parents. I have a problem with that - it seems completely inappropriate on any number of levels, and I wonder if in the long run it is really good for the students.
I enjoy teaching (seventh-grade social studies), and do the best I can. However, when my work-day is done I go home to this thing called my life. If I kept Mr. Esquith's hours, my wife would, she told me, divorce me. My friends would never see me. I would never make new friends except in the context of my teaching. In other words, my life would be thrown completely out of balance, as is Mr. Esquith's.
While new teachers will perhaps be inspired by Mr. Esquith's heroics, they should ask themselves if they plan on following Mr. Esquith's path. Veteran teachers like myself will probably not benefit much from this book. We'll be too busy wondering why on earth Mr. Esquith would want to spend so much of his time with other people's ten-year-olds. This is not sour grapes. What I do as a teacher would not work for Mr. Esquith. What Mr. Esquith does as a teacher would not work for the vast majority of those in the teaching profession.
Perhaps, as The New York Times says, Rafe Esquith is a genius and a saint. All I know is that I prefer my life to the one he represents as his.
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