Story-Teller
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- Joined
- Feb 22, 2009
- Messages
- 2,406
Marva Collins
“You can’t weep or talk your way through a mess. When you come up against a problem, you have to work your way through it.”
—Marva Collins
There are many excuses why Johnny can’t read. But to Marva Collins, Johnny can read—and if he is challenged, he can read far more than we would imagine. Educated in the South, Marva learned about teaching from caring and inspiring teachers and principals and from her own common sense. After moving to Chicago, she continued her teaching career. At first, she followed the recommended curriculum but came to believe that such stories as “Run, Spot, Run” had no meaning for children. She added Aesop’s Fables and other classic children’s stories to the classroom fare.
Marva told her students that they were the “brightest in the world.” While children in other classes were struggling to learn thirteen words in a basal reader, her students wrote about the brontosaurus and tyrannosaurus. Colleagues belittled Marva’s techniques, and she was eventually harassed out of the public school system. Convinced that her ideas about education were valid, Marva opened a private school, taking in problem children. She taught Shakespeare, Dickens, and other classics, and her students memorized quotations and poems, solved real mathematical word problems, and openly discussed the issues of life. Marva’s students responded with a hunger for knowledge, and when her first class of “misfits” took standardized achievement tests, they ranked well above the national average.
Consider This: What could we accomplish if we were truly inspired and pushed to meet our real potential?
Submitted by Richard
“You can’t weep or talk your way through a mess. When you come up against a problem, you have to work your way through it.”
—Marva Collins
There are many excuses why Johnny can’t read. But to Marva Collins, Johnny can read—and if he is challenged, he can read far more than we would imagine. Educated in the South, Marva learned about teaching from caring and inspiring teachers and principals and from her own common sense. After moving to Chicago, she continued her teaching career. At first, she followed the recommended curriculum but came to believe that such stories as “Run, Spot, Run” had no meaning for children. She added Aesop’s Fables and other classic children’s stories to the classroom fare.
Marva told her students that they were the “brightest in the world.” While children in other classes were struggling to learn thirteen words in a basal reader, her students wrote about the brontosaurus and tyrannosaurus. Colleagues belittled Marva’s techniques, and she was eventually harassed out of the public school system. Convinced that her ideas about education were valid, Marva opened a private school, taking in problem children. She taught Shakespeare, Dickens, and other classics, and her students memorized quotations and poems, solved real mathematical word problems, and openly discussed the issues of life. Marva’s students responded with a hunger for knowledge, and when her first class of “misfits” took standardized achievement tests, they ranked well above the national average.
Consider This: What could we accomplish if we were truly inspired and pushed to meet our real potential?
Submitted by Richard
