Coach Took On Decathlon to Spice Up Job

Coach David Tokofsky and the members of John Marshall High School’s academic decathlon team all got together for the same reason: They were bored with the routine of school life.

“I was desperate for a little bit of intellectual vitality,” Tokofsky said in a weekend interview, and so were the students.

“Kids always say school is boring. They say it so often that maybe we should believe them,” he said.

Tokofsky--a soft-spoken man with a full beard, who usually wears blue jeans and work shirts to school--took over the coaching duties last fall when the previous coach took maternity leave.

What followed was a grinding year of study and testing that garnered the Marshall team the city, state and now the national championship in what is the intellectual Olympics for 11th- and 12th-graders.

Along the way, Tokofsky also became a spokesman for young teachers angry about their low salaries. Last week, he testified so eloquently on the subject before the Assembly that even the normally boisterous legislators quieted down and listened.

Tokofsky received bonuses totaling $3,000 for taking the team to the national finals, raising his salary to about $21,000. He said he is thinking about quitting teaching after next year to get a graduate degree in history or law.

Marshall’s principal, Don Hahn, who chose Tokofsky as coach, said he shares Tokofsky’s salary concerns, but he said he hopes a that the coach stays in teaching.

“He is really dedicated to the students,” Hahn said.

Tokofsky said he decided last spring to seek the job because it offered a change of pace from teaching English as a second language, which had been his assignment since he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983.

The once-a-day decathlon class (this year he also is teaching a normal load of social studies courses) offered him a chance to study and teach subjects that are not part of the standard high school curriculum, like music, theology and art history.

The only drawback, he said, was that it meant he no longer would have time to coach soccer.

“It broke my heart,” he said, “but I had to take academics over athletics.”

‘Total Experience’

Three years of soccer coaching had showed him that youngsters crave what he called “a total experience.”

“Kids at this age are looking for something to almost become obsessive about,” Tokofsky said.

“They are looking to find out who they are, and they like to push it to the limit. Other kids are obsessive about cruising Hollywood Boulevard or snorting cocaine or working in McDonald’s. These guys became obsessive about learning.”

Even his biggest fans say Tokofsky became obsessive about winning the decathlon. And that, they say, made it happen.

“He’s the whole thing,” said David Wolf, whose son, Ben, is on the team. “The guy really cared about these kids; he knows each one, their tendencies, their foibles, and knows how to work them.”

David Florey, the Marshall senior who scored the highest of all 400 participants in the national finals, said: “It wouldn’t have worked if he had treated us like kids. He treated us like adults and reminded us what we needed to do--and he gave us some minor guilt trips.”

For Tokofsky, it was a constant challenge.

“I’m lucky if I can stay a half-step ahead of them,” he said of his team. “Most of the time I’m running to catch up.”

Magna Cum Laude

Tokofsky, 26, grew up in Pacific Palisades and graduated from Pacific Palisades High School. His mother is an elementary school teacher, and his father is a movie producer. He majored in history and Spanish at Berkeley and graduated magna cum laude.

Tokofsky said that many good teachers could have had similar experiences if they had only 12 students in a class instead of 30 or 40. That way, he said, one can teach students to teach themselves.

His reward?

“It’s not the end, it’s the process. I like the kids. They’re tremendous.”