This Teacher Works Six Days a Week

By Margot Hornblower/Los Angeles

The Abbess in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors is a baby-faced actress with a Korean accent and a Betty Boop voice. Yet ponytailed and blue-jeaned Rebecca Seo, 9, brings to the role all the majesty of Elizabethan prose as she stands on a desk at Hobart Boulevard Elementary School, declaiming, "The venom clamours of a jealous woman/ Poisons more deadly than a mad dog's tooth."

The shy Rebecca cannot quite bring herself to embrace Aegeon, her long-lost husband, in the form of Dustin Barrera, 10. No matter--the teacher is impressed. Did anyone help her rehearse the lines? he asks. The diminutive citizens of Ephesus erupt in laughter. It's an inside joke: as the teacher well knows, none of his actors come from English-speaking homes.

In the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District, where nearly half of the 711,000 students speak limited English, Hobart, a squat stucco campus surrounded by a chain-link fence, serves 2,200 children. More than three-quarters are Latino, nearly a fifth are Korean--and 92% are poor enough to qualify for free lunch. A third of Hobart's teachers lack certification. A few weeks ago, the school was locked down at midday when a taxi driver was shot nearby.

But politicians, burbling over how to educate the underclass, would do well to stop by Room 56 this week, as Rafe Esquith's fifth-grade class mounts its annual Shakespeare play. There are few costumes--mainly T shirts inscribed with an image of the Bard under the words WILL POWER. Most of Esquith's 29 pupils are classified as gifted or high achievers, but that hardly guarantees success in an environment where poverty and gangsterism are endemic. Some of his incoming students this year "didn't know two times three," he says. "Four of them couldn't write a sentence in any language."

The 45-year-old teacher hangs his motto over the chalkboard in large black letters: THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS!! He opens his classroom at 7 a.m.--an hour early--for optional math study. After regular classes end at 2:48 p.m., he offers 45 minutes of Shakespeare, rehearsing a single play all year. Afterward, still on his own time, Esquith coaches volleyball, teaches computer use and helps with homework. Saturday mornings he tutors 40 former pupils, in Grades 6 through 9, in more Shakespeare--along with Ibsen, Chekhov, algebra and SAT preparation. Saturday afternoons he rehearses music with his students. "Call me the 'Education Equalizer,'" Esquith says, noting that middle-class kids get sports, music and extra tutoring, while poor children usually go home to TV and the temptations of the street.

Sound like a grind? Listen to the peals of laughter bouncing off the classroom walls. Esquith's Shakespeare goes down like a strawberry milk shake, as textual analysis is interspersed with anecdotes ("Richard Burton once peed in his armor, and the tinkle made the other actors giggle!"). Students without speaking parts play music that would make old Will squirm: Aegeon's plea for a stay of execution is accompanied by the Beatles' Help!, and the pursuit of a portly servant is enlivened with Queen's Fat Bottomed Girls. An overhead video shows the screaming crowds in Godzilla as the actors chase Antipholus around the classroom. "Shakespeare's fun," Esquith says. "And they learn tons of vocabulary."

For 14 years, Esquith has spent most of his salary, now $39,000, to buy extra books, videos, art and computer supplies, and to help fund student trips to Washington and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Last year Esquith took 15 teenagers to England, where they toured the Globe Theatre and partied with Sir Ian McKellen. McKellen, actor Hal Holbrook and various California businesses have contributed $100,000 to Esquith's new nonprofit foundation, the Hobart Shakespeareans. But the Education Equalizer still finds himself with $80,000 in credit-card debt--all spent, he says, on "Rafe's kids," as they are known around the school.

Ask those kids what they want to do in life, and the hands shoot up: Grace Hwang--astronaut! Kevin Palma--physicist! Linda Kim--artist! Only one, the little abbess, confesses, "When I grow up, I want to be a teacher like Rafe." Esquith takes on a mock-serious tone. "Shame on you!" he says.