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

Categorized in : Children Kids Baseball

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

Rafe Esquith

journey perfection art

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, perseverance, and generosity of spirit are, in the final analysis, far more important

Rafe Esquith

perseverance hard-work teacher

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

motivation teaching jewels

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

teacher jobs children

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

real kids children

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

foundation reading people

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

teacher children school

Teach like your hair's on fire!

Rafe Esquith

like-you fire hair

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

eye laughing kids

It’s not the job of the teacher to save a child’s soul; it is the teacher’s job to provide an opportunity for the child to save his own soul.

Rafe Esquith

teacher jobs children

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

teacher jobs children

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

sorry exercise fall

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

Rafe Esquith

leadership needs thinking

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

Rafe Esquith

tests giving-up teacher

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

summer kids children

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

successful country kids

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

drs kings kids

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

successful goes-on years

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

be-good tragedy

If a child is going to grow into a truly special adult–someone who thinks, considers other points of view, has an open mind, and possesses the ability to discuss great ideas with other people–a love of reading is an essential foundation.

Rafe Esquith

reading children thinking