Marva Collins was not going to let and child make her a bad teacher.First she had to convince the children she cared about them, convince them to trust her, and make them believe they could do anything they wanted to do.
To me an error means a child needs help, not a reprimand or ridicule for doing it wrong. No child should ever be told “That’s stupid” or “You can’t do it” or “You don’t know what you’re doing.” Adults should take a positive approach with children. The most important thing we can do as parents and teachers is build a child’s self-confidence. Any children can learn if he or she has not already been taught too thoroughly that learning is impossible.
Children need reassurance and encouragement. They have to be told that it is all right to make mistakes because mistakes are part of learning. I tell my students: If you knew everything there is to know, then you wouldn’t have to be in school.
Praise is essential in developing the right attitude toward learning and toward school. We all know this in theory. In practice we often forget the importance of praise in dealing with children. We forget how sensitive children can be and how fragile their egos are. It is painful for a child to be told “This is wrong.” Rather than punishing, teachers and parents should encourage continued effort:“This is good. It’s a wonderful try, but it is not quite right. Let’s try correcting this together.”I find that children often understand a concept better when you take them to the blackboard rather than trying to show them at their seat. He trained me to watch the students’ faces, to see by their eyes if they understood.
I learned that a good teacher knows the students, not just the subject. Everybody was test crazy. It seemed as though the administrators only wanted to probe IQs and rank test scores. It didn’t matter whether the children learned anything at all. Nothing was important except their performance on standardized tests.
Teachers were supposed to teach skills specifically for those tests. The strange things is that if a child didn’t learn, no one held the teachers responsible. If an eighth grader didn’t know how to read, no one went back to that child’s first, second, or third grade teacher to ask what went wrong. No, it was always the child’s fault.Marva made sure she found something to praise in each of the children every day, even if it was nothing more than the color of their socks, a new pencil, a bright smile, or a good job of washing the back of their neck.She never reprimanded a saucy remark like the one Jerome had made. She saw it as a test, a personal challenge. She liked to think she could transform anything into a learning experience.It was typical of the spontaneous lessons Marva treated her class to daily. Nothing was irrelevant if it could be used to pique a child’s intellectual curiosity.That was her method, to pool as much information as possible, to bombard the children with names and facts and anecdotes they could draw upon later. Of course the children wouldn’t remember everything. Exposure to knowledge was what mattered. Some of it would sink in.Naturally my optimum goal was to get the children in this class to see the intrinsic value of an education, so that they would want to learn for the sake of learning. That would come eventually. While I had no use for bribes, I strongly believed in rewards. Praise—every day for every task—was the main incentive.Everyone thinks a school is a place where children learn. What else is a school for? People still believe in the tradition of dedicated, self-sacrificing school teachers. They don’t know how the profession has changed.The search for a school for my own three children opened my eyes: the public schools had no monopoly on poor education.
Miseducation was a problem everywhere, a galloping epidemic that was infecting every school from the city to the suburbs whether public, parochial, or private. What was once the poor man’s burden had become everyone’s.A winner never quits and a quitter never wins! Winners in life respond positively to pressure. If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Each day the children repeated those sayings. Each day I proclaimed the message, driving home the importance of a positive attitude. I expected it of my students. Suddenly I no longer had it myself.I love you, she told him. I love you all, and I am going to continue to love you and care about you and worry about you. Sometimes things happen in life that we can’t do anything about. We don’t let them get us down, do we? Wo go on doing the best we can, making something of our lives. If you stop learning, if you stop building your minds, then everything I have been teaching you is wasted. Then you will make me a failure as a teacher.I was glad the parents were taking a stand. However, I was no longer going to be involved. I had settled the matter for myself and had started to feel comfortable with my decision.A pledge to ourselvesThis day has been given to me fresh and clear, I can either use it or throw it away. I promise I shall use this day to its fullest, realizing it can never come back again. I realize this is my life to use or to throw away.Don’t worry so much about feeding your stomach. Feed your brain first and you’ll always find a way to get food for your stomach. Wouldn’t the frogs have been better off learning how to take care of themselves? The fable shows us we have to lead ourselves instead of looking for others to lead us. If we don’t think for ourselves, others will do what? They will do our thinking for us. We must each be the captain of our fate and the master of our soul. Eventually, with lots of praise and lots of hugging, his defensiveness would melt. The one thing all children finally wanted was the chance to be accepted for themselves, to feel some self-worth. Once they felt it, children became addicted to learning, and they had the desire to learn forever.Where Tracy became weepy, Gray would get angry. He’d take one look at the exercises or homework papers, shake his head, and shove them under his desk. I didn’t make a big deal about it. I handed him the same paper along with the new one on the next day. It took about five days for Gary and the other children to know I was always in control of the classroom. When Gary threw a batch of papers on the floor, I saw an opportunity to set things straight.“I know children are always testing their limits,” I said, “because when I was a child, I was always testing mine, always trying to see what I could get away with. Here isn’t a track you can pull on me that I don’t know. I probably did it myself when I was your age because I was full of mischief and always getting ideas in my head. My mind was always clicking, but it wasn’t always to my advantage.”“You have to take stumbles before you can learn to walk”, I told him. “it’s all right to make mistakes. I make mistakes. I’m only a poor mortal and I don’t have all the answers. I don’t always understand things. I’m counting on you to help me with my mistakes and I’ll help you with yours. However, I do not have all the money in the world to spend on books, and you have no right to destroy the ones we have. If you do not wish to use them, then someone else will, but you have no right to ruin them for others.As the weeks passed, Gary found it difficult to remain hostile. No matter how many times he shouted to me, “I hate you and I’m not going to do the damn work,” I always answered, “I love you all the time, even when you behave like this.” I guess it took the fun out of fighting. A fair fight was one thing; taking swipes at someone who wasn’t fighting back was quite another. Gradually Gary began to do the work. He still had an attitude. And he didn’t get along with the other children. “Don’t say I can’t, ”Marva told her. “Say, I’ll try. If you say, I’ll try, then we’ll get it done together.”Erika的问题：I realized then how blind I had been. I should have recognized the problem before. All the signs had been there, laid out before me in a pattern like the numbered drawings in a coloring book. I recalled that Mrs. McCoy had brought a pot of spaghetti for the whole class on Erika’s second day in school. I recalled hearing that she took Erika to the movies or to an amusement park on weekday afternoons. No wonder endearments and praise hadn’t worked. The child was used to hearing them all the time, indiscriminately. In that moment I saw that Erika had been begging not only for attention but for discipline.I saw a lot of myself in Erika, the same strong will and determination. I had to show her that I was more determined than she. The four other children had forgotten about their own work and were watching. If I didn’t do something fast, I was going to lose all of them. I whirled around, grabbing the first object that came to hand, an extension pipe from a vacuum cleaner left by the maintenance crew. Clutching the pipe in my hand, I stood over Erika and stared her dead in the eye.“I’m going to kill you today if you don’t finish your paper,” I shouted. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I was stunned at having spoken them. Still dazed by my rage, I heard one of the children gasp. They were all listening with large-eyed disbelief. There was a loud throbbing deep in my own throat and my whole body was quivering.I didn’t know what had come over me. I could never hit a child. Never. I had never in my life threatened a child. I wondered whether this desperation was for Erika or for myself. I wished I could drop the pipe to the floor and go on with the lesson as if nothing had happened. But once I had begun this thing, I had to see it through. The big question was whether the child would call my bluff.Holding back the quaver in my voice, I told her, “Everyone says you are crazy. I don’t believe that. But if you don’t finish that paper, then I’ll know you’re crazy. You might as well be dead if you are going to go through life the way you are.”
Erika’s eyes were riveted on the paper. Her hands were planted firmly on it, palms flat and fingers pressed together. Her right hand jerked slightly, tipping the pencil off the desk. She leaned over, picked it up, and held it pinched between her thumb and forefinger. She hastily circled the word throw as a synonym for pitch. Moving on to the second question, she matched silly with foolish.
I decided to take care of one problem at a time.
Erika joined the other children in the reading group. Over the next few days she seemed to become a different child. Of course her change had really not come about suddenly. All those week Erika had probably been working things out in her own head, taking note of herself and the other students. And she had been sizing me up, testing my attitude, my trustworthiness, and my acceptance of her. It wasn’t my threat that made her alter her behavior for the long run. What sustained the change in Erika was her own decision to settle down, a decision contingent on whether I came through for her. I did my best. Learning was to be a group effort. Everyone in the school was part of the team, and like any team, the school would only work if everyone pulled together. This was the first time I was dealing with so many different age groups and achievement levels. Without the all-for-one-and-one-for-all spirit, there was no way to get a twelve year old to feel good about sitting in the same room with children five, six, and seven years old.
I was tire of the routine, but I never let it show. A good teacher has to be a ham. I always tried to appear as fresh and energetic as if I were teaching the exercises for the first time. Each child at the school got the work he or she needed. That was the only way I could effectively teach such an assortment of students. I would say, “we don’t all wear the same size shoe, do we ? When we go to the doctor, we don’t all get the same kind of medicine, do we? ” If a child was having difficulty with homonyms such as to and too, the appropriate worksheet would be on the desk the next morning.
None of the individualized lessons could be prepared in advance because I never knew what specific need or weakness would surface each day.
There are 180 rules for consonant and vowel sounds. We were constantly repeating drills and reviewing phonics.
There was no competitive atmosphere.
By loving and touching and talking to each child, I tried to create an atmosphere of mutual caring. The children cheered one another when they recited or read aloud, and occasionally they applauded me.
First I reassured the children that the tests were not going to show who was smarter than someone else. They were only a tool for me to use in determining which subjects needed more of our attention in class.
A rest from school is not a rest from learning.
In an effort to follow John Dewey’s notion of a student-centered rather than subject-centered approach to learning, schools have too often sacrificed subject matter, being more concerned with how they taught rather than what they taught.
The problem is that some schools cannot strike a balance between “progressive” and “traditional” teaching methods. People wrongly assume that it has to be one or the other. If you teach the basics in a classical curriculum, you can still pay attention to a child’s feelings and attitudes. Moreover, it is a mistake to assume that in order to stimulate creativity and critical thinking you must rule out any learning by rote. Memorization is the only way to teach such things as phonics, grammar, spelling, and multiplication tables.
There is a tendency in education to reject arbitrarily a method of teaching simply because it’s old-fashioned. The fact is a teacher can combine both progressive and traditional approaches to learning, each enhancing the other. There is no reason why a teacher can’t be sensitive to a child’s needs and at the same time teach the child subject matter and skills.
“Don’t give me that ‘I’m finished’ business,” she said. “We are never finished in life. We don’t ever stand around idly or sit with our hands folded, acquiescing. God isn’t finished with you and I’m not either.”
积极暗示： Throughout the year, as in every year of my teaching, my main goal was to motivate the students to make something worthwhile of their lives. Everything we said or did in class was directed toward that aim. More than anything I wanted to supplant apathy and defeatism with positive expectations. I didn’t want my children to feel stigmatized by where they lived. I didn’t want them to succumb to a ghetto mentality. If I had my way, they would dream and hope and strive and obtain success.
I was forever compiling lists of positive, motivating slogans: You are unique---there is no one else like you.The world moves aside to let you pass only if you know where you are going.Character is what you know you are and not what others think you are.You know you better than anyone else in this world.People’s ideas actually tell you how they feel about themselves.
And I was constantly reminding the children that some of the greatest people in history--- Socrates, Milton, Galileo, Einstein, Edison, and Columbus---were ridiculed and told they would never amount to anything.
Every day I put a different quotation on the board:What I do concerns me, not what others think of me.
I felt it was as important to deal with attitudes as with any of the academic subjects. In fact it is probably more important. Without the right attitude, everything else is wasted.
“How are you going to run a corporation if you can’t run yourself ? Are you going to sit behind a conference table in an executive suite popping gum or sticking your fingers in your fingers in your mouth? How are you going to keep your life in order if you can’t keep your appearance or your desk or your notebook in order?”
My approach is to address a fault without ever attacking a child’s character. Who they were was always separate and distinct from what they did. The gum chewing was displeasing, not the child. I might tell a child, “You are acting like a fool. Why? You are not a fool.” With that difference clearly established, the children could open themselves to my comments and criticisms. A child could give up the behavior without giving up and dignity or self-worth. I tried to show the children that I wasn’t sticking them with an arbitrary list of do’s and don’ts. These were the rules of etiquette observed in the adult world.
There is a time to talk and a time to shut up. A time to be proud and a time to be humble. Instead of teaching black pride I taught my children self-pride. All I want was for them to accept themselves. I pointed out that in many ways the ghetto is a state of mind. If you have a positive attitude about yourself, then no one can out you down for who you are or where you live.
学生打架的处理方式： Fighting upset me more than anything else, and my students knew it. I told them that when they fought they didn’t hurt each other, they hurt me. It meant I failed to teach them what values were important in life. I never took sides in a student scuffle, and I refused to hear who threw the first punch. Instead of listening to any feeble excuse about who did what to whom, I had the two culprits embrace and say“ I love you” to another. It was a fairly good peace-keeping technique----most of the time. “I don’t want to hear that,” I said. “I don’t care who started it or who finished it. How much are you worth to yourself? Are you willing to destroy yourself to get back at someone? Do you have to prove to the crowd that you take nothing from no one? Do you have to prove you’re tough? Don’t throw away your life.” “I don’t believe in saying ‘Oh, he’s just a child’ or ‘She’s just a child.’ The way you act as children will determine what kind of adults you become. School is a miniature society where we learn and practice to become useful adults. You must use your time wisely we can’t begin to make something of our lives when we are filled with hate. It’s not an easy thing, but you’ve got to learn to walk away from your enemies. If you don’t, they will drag you down.”
知识的综合和拓展： In one of the most unlikely progressions of learning I began talking once about triangles and ended up with Hindu-began talking once about triangles and ended up with Hinduism. For every story the children read in their basal readers, I brought supplementary material. I also pointed out every allusion in a story, not ignoring a single footnote at the bottom of a page. I blitzed the children with facts, but I did not go into all subjects in detail. Mostly, I hit upon them in a generalized way. I wanted to get my students to see the flow of knowledge. I read constantly in order to tie together fragments of information and interweave subjects. I read with an urgency so I could teach my students what they needed to know. I believe a teacher has to keep polishing his ore her skills. You can’t take the attitude“ I know how to teach,” and resist learning anything new.
教师自身阅读拓展带给学生的文学拓展： I was always on the lookout for a new book to spark my children’s interest. Teaching children to read was one thing; keeping them interested in reading was something else. I was forever reading up on new children’s books in The New York Times Book Review, the local Sunday newspapers, and The Library Journal. I searched through Masterplots and Children’s Treasury for the Taking. And I stalked bookstores and libraries on a regular basis. I feel that to be a good elementary school teacher one need to have a general knowledge about all fields of study. The best training a teacher can have is a solid liberal arts education. Instead of emphasizing methods courses, training institutions should require education majors to have a broad background in literature, science, art, music, and philosophy. The object of teaching is to impart as much knowledge as possible. Students can only give back what a teacher gives out. When I lost a student to coloring and cut-outs, I didn’t try to dissuade his mother. Parents set their own expectations for their children, and they have to decide whether a particular school or teaching method suits their needs. Not all parents like the Montessori approach. Not all parents favor the Suzuki method of teaching children a musical instrument. So I didn’t expect every parent to be satisfied with Westside Prep. I couldn’t be all things to all people, and I didn’t try to be. Others seemed to want to turn over all responsibility for their children to me. I believe it is the parents who must be strong and set the tone. Yet some parents don’t spend time reading, don’t read to their children, and don’t have books around the house. Somehow they expect teachers to make their children into competent and eager readers. There are parents who don’t set rules and limitations for their children, yet they expect the teacher to maintain discipline and order in the classroom. And some parents wonder why their children don’t do homework, yet at home these same children are never given responsibilities or chores. If I wasn’t battling the parents’ criticisms, then I was fighting their apathy. Some of the very same parents who had pleaded with me to rescue their children washed their hands of any further involvement once the children were in my school. Some of them didn’t give a damn about what happened to their children, though I struggled every step of the way to teach them. Yet, finally, when many of my students were reading and learning material well beyond their age lever, there were parents who declared there had never been a learning problem in the first place. What upset me was the idea of people forgetting where they had come from. So I repeatedly warned my students, “Don’t you ever forget what you started from when you first came to this school. Don’t forget how envious and ashamed you were because you couldn’t read as well as some of your classmates. Don’t forget, because when you grow up and finish college, you are the ones who are going to have to come back here to neighborhoods like Garfield Park and turn them into places people want to live in and not run away from.” And social studies lessons were just as diverse, with kindergarteners learning about building strong communities, first-graders studying citizenship and national heroes, second-graders exploring the seven continents, third-graders looking at Chicago history and politics, fourth-graders learning about state and federal government, and fifth though eighth-graders studying various periods of American and European history. Whenever possible I tried to teach subjects not in isolation but as part of a central curriculum. Language arts (reading, writing, grammar, and vocabulary) were correlated with social studies and science. For example, when the children learned about the seven continents, they read a story from one of the countries under discussion. When they studied the solar system, they read about the lives of Galileo and Copernicus, compared Aristotle’s theories to Galileo’s, wrote reports about them, and analyzed the parts of speech in such sentences as Copernicus showed that the planets revolve around the sun.I have always believed young children can grasp complicated words, as long as they know how to syllabicate and decode sounds. No word is too difficult if a child has the right phonics tools. The only thing standing between a young child and a difficult word is the child’s fear of it. By exposing them to the complexities of language, I made sure my children were not intimidated by words. “Whenever I spoke, I tried to supplement their vocabulary by serving up new words. And I urged them to incorporate the new words into class discussion and into their compositions. The expansion of the school from eighteen to thirty students had sunk us into a financial hole. Clarence was working more part-time jobs than I could keep track of. We poured all of our savings into the school, ignored the upkeep of our house, and let our life insurance policies lapse. Your picture appearing in the paper today is not going to make you happy for the rest of your life. Getting your picture in the paper or in every magazine in this country is not going to pay your bills. It’s not going to put food on your table or keep you warm in the winter, people are impressed by what you have learned so far, but that doesn’t mean you can sit back and congratulate yourselves and doing nothing. The more successful a person becomes, the harder he or she has to work to stay there. Let’s not worry about what people write about us. Let’s just worry about getting things right ourselves. Once I entered the classroom the rest of the world didn’t exist. My students knew and understood me better than everyone else. There was no miracle or magic in what went on in our school. If it were that simple, then teaching would not have been so demanding for the children. It was because of all the effort and difficulty that the children savored every accomplishment. And once they started to succeed they wanted to succeed even more. They didn’t even want to turn around again. Like every teacher I had days when I was impatient with my students’ progress. There were times when I could not seem to break through to a child. And there were some lessons that fell on deaf ears no matter how much I banged on desks or waved my arms to get the point across. Yet I made certain that I never underestimated by children’s intelligence or their ability to learn. I kept in mind the countless schools across the country that mislabeled children, simplified textbooks, diluted curricula, and created special curricula for “underprivileged” children. How many are victimized by an educational philosophy which presupposes that background and environment limit a child’s capacity to learn? How many children are discouraged from pursuing an education because teachers have taken it upon themselves to judge who can achieve and who cannot? I wasn’t there to judge my students. My job as a teacher was to get their talents working. And that’s what I tried to do. We read to stretch the mind, to seek, to strive, to wonder, and then reread. We discuss the ideas contained in those books with others, and we temper our own thoughts. The great books are great teachers because they demand the attention of the reader. The mundane content of second-rate literature turns students off from reading forever. Slower children needed to be praised for something daily just as much as the brighter child. We have to be conscious of everything we say to children. You have to make yourself aware of how they might interpret something that we say very innocently.Remember, if you take the problems to the parent, you and the child will not learn to trust each other and work together. Children respect teachers who do not always send notes home to parents. When teachers turn to the education experts for help, they rarely seem to offer any practical advice. The experts are busy trying to build professional reputations based on some new gimmick. No amount of money or theory or gimmicky will cure what is wrong education. Teachers need to stop looking for excuses and teach. They have to read and prepare and learn what they do not know, and then they have to bring that knowledge to their students, taking as much time as necessary to make sure every child learns. Any teacher who leaves a child as she found him negates her duty as a teacher. Everything works when the teacher works. It’s as easy as that, and as hard. It’s your duty to find a way to reach every child. If the child doesn’t move, it’s the teacher’s fault. Ella praised the children, patted them, scolded them, hugged them, prodded them, joked with them, was firm with them, held their hands, and pumped them full of confidence and love. “Each teacher must prepare, prepare, prepare, and prepare some more,” Marva had told her. “We never assign to children what we do not understand ourselves never assign children books that you haven’t read. Remember, written book reports are often copied. The child copies the front of the book, the middle, and the end. Have the child describe the book orally, and be ready for the child to test you to see if you have read the book. ”
