Marva Delores Collins (née Knight; August 31, 1936 – June 24, 2015) was an American educator who started Westside Preparatory School in the impoverished Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago in 1975.
Students do not need to be labeled or measured any more than they are. They don't need more Federal funds, grants, and gimmicks. What they need from us is common sense, dedication, and bright, energetic teachers who believe that all children are achievers and who take personally the failure of any one child.
You can't find me 20 children in Chicago, I don't care which section you go in - you can be on Michigan Avenue or here - and they won't be able to tell you that y is a vowel when it's the final syllable in a word, as in Nancy and icy. And no one bothers to teach the rules anymore - "i before e except after c. "
The more monies we spend, the less children learn; because the more machines we have there, the more gadgets, the more gimmicks, the less children have to really think - the less they have to use their innate abilities, their curiosity, their brains.
Don't try to fix the students, fix ourselves first. The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior. When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.
There is a lot of money to be made from miseducation, from the easy to read easy to learn textbooks, workbooks, teacher manuals, educational games and visual aids. The textbook business is more than a billion-dollar-a-year industry and some of its biggest profits come from 'audio-visual aids' - flash cards, tape cassettes, and filmstrips. No wonder the education industry encourages schools to focus on surface education.
Before I can effectively discipline students, I have to earn their friendship and respect.
I have discovered few learning disabled students in my three decades of teaching. I have, however, discovered many, many victims of teaching inabilities.
I believe the more difficult a child is, the more I want that child. But I won't take a child until the parent brings him to us. So it is just the opposite - we get the ones that no one else will take. We get sawdust, and we have to make boards out of it.
Until kids decide, 'I am a miracle. I am unique. There is no one else exactly like me,' they can never draw the conclusion, 'Because I'm a miracle, I will never harm another person who's a miracle like me. ' In this slippery world, they all need something to hang on to.
Everything works when the teacher works. It's as easy as that, and as hard.
An error means a child needs help, not a reprimand or ridicule for doing something wrong.
Teaching children to read was one thing; keeping them interested in reading was something else.
There isn't a certain time we should set aside to talk about God. God is part of our every waking moment
Praise is essential in developing the right attitude toward learning and toward school.
I think what we've done is given children a lot of things that they didn't ask for instead of what they do want.
One night my son was downstairs studying, and he had been up so late all that week, and my husband said, "I feel so sorry for him. " I said, "Look, if he's going to become a surgeon" - he is studying to be a doctor - "he's going to have his hard times. I feel sorry for him too, but if he lives in this world he's going to have more hard times. He's going to stay up some more nights. " I think we can't shield them from the hard times, even though we'd like to. I say to the children that I teach and to my own - I can't test the ground for you and tell you that's a safe step there.
Everyone who comes in is just amazed that our children do not have the animosity, the hatred, because these children are into it. You know, once you learn to like yourself, then you don't see this black-white bit. I still say that a good basic education is the only thing. I feel guilty sometimes because I don't think Jesus Christ could get any more accolades than I do when I walk through that classroom, even from the children I do not teach. They know that I love them, but I am forever telling them, "Get into that seat so you can have choices in this world. "
You can pay people to teach, But you can't pay them to care.
There is a brilliant child locked inside every student.
[Kid] never learned to read in kindergarten, first, and second, so in third grade he begins to be placed in the EMH or the learning-disabled rooms.