“Lord Love the Children”…
Renowned Educator Shows Students It’s All Inside Them
By BRETT THOMASSON El Reno Daily Tribune
He who eats my bread does my will. -- Marcus Aurelius
That stern Roman proverb serves as much more than a memory exercise for students who have Marva Collins for a teacher -- it tells them what their lives will be like.
“There are two kinds of people in the world, children,” she says. “There are creators, and then there are second-handers; there are parasites. What will you be?”
Creators, she said, have “an unbarred vision.” They may suffer and be opposed by people, but they will win. Second-handers will do what they’re told.
Collins was a Chicago public school teacher in 1975 when she became disillusioned with the way public schools worked. So she founded her own school, and has been featured on “60 Minutes,” had her story told in a TV movie, and turned down offers from two presidents to serve as the United States Secretary of Education.
Through the Marva Collins Westside Preparatory School Foundation, teachers and principals at 25 Oklahoma schools, including Webster Elementary School, have taken part in training designed to spread the word about her methods.
Two teachers from Webster traveled to Chicago to watch what goes on in Collins’ school. In this year’s state standardized tests, the students in their classrooms scored 20 percent above last years results.
For three weeks, the foundation is sponsoring a visit from Collins and two of her teachers at Ponca City’s Marland Mansion. This is the first time she has tried her techniques outside of her own school.
Collins said the ability to succeed like the Webster children did is in each child. “This is no miracle of Marva Collins,” she said. “I don’t put anything in these children. It’s there, I just have to work to get it out.”
Among the things that were “there” in a group of about 20 nine- to 11-year olds: the ability to count to 10 in a variety of languages, including Punjabi, Japanese and Swahili; the ability to discover the Latin roots of words; the ability to expand base words such as parentheses and Bacchus into parenthetically and bacchanalian and more. A lot more.
There are arguments against teaching children this young such things. Collins has heard them, and her most potent defense is the string of academic success her students have produced: scholarships to private high schools, academic honor academies and advanced degrees from prestigious colleges.
She has other answers to people who say students can’t learn or understand that much. “Can’t” is probably the worst four-letter word someone can utter in Collins’ hearing.
“Children, do you know the words to rap songs?” she asks when someone stumbles in reciting a poem. “Raise your hands if you know the words to at least one rap song.” A sea of hands waves excitedly.
“Then you can learn this poem,” she says. The poem is “Wonderful Word” by William Rans. “What is the difference between a rap song and a poem?”
The children agree that rap songs are more fun to listen to, but there isn’t much difference in learning them. “See, you can learn it.”
The problem, she says, is that they have learned to equate a mistake with failing. If she can cure them of nothing else, she can cure them of that.
“What is school, children? School is a practice place. Even the greatest masters did not always create a masterpiece. Their back yards were probably full of wadded-up old canvas they threw out.”
If they cannot make a mistake, the children repeat, they cannot learn.
“You see, you’re afraid of looking ridiculous. Children today are afraid of looking ridiculous. If you live long enough, you’ll look ridiculous. Only a fool is perfect, and that’s just because he doesn’t know he’s a fool.”
Again, an answer comes slowly. “Who wrote ‘Beat It?’” she asks.
“Michael Jackson,” is the quick response.
“Now, why didn’t you answer the other question that quickly? Yooou…taaalk…liiike… thiiiis…fooor…Miiisses…Collliinss…queeestion, but when I asked who wrote ‘Beat It,’ you said ‘Michaeljackson.’ Your speech did not what, children?”
“Did not go trippingly upon the tongue!” they recite loudly with her. “And who wrote that? It was William…”
“Shakespeare!”
“And he was a playwright, which means he wrote…”
“Plays!”
What on Earth good does it do, detractors ask, for children to know the numbers from one to 10 in Punjabi? Will they remember it? And how much can children understand of the proverbs that they memorize, such as Henry David Thoreau’s “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.”
They understand some, Collins says. And since they must learn things, they might as well learn things that they will one day use and want to know.
Attention wanes as lunchtime nears, and young bodies become restless. There are nearly 20 people in this room who couldn’t care less if something is Daedelusian or Icarian.
“Children, you will not remember everything you learn here in the three weeks we are together,” Collins says. “Some of these things will not stay with you.
“But there was a man named John Donne, who said that when he was 6, his father would read all kinds of books to him. When he grew up, he said, he didn’t always remember what he had heard then. But the seed had been planted.
“That’s what we are doing here. It’s exposure. We’re planting a seed that will germinate.”
How an assignment is presented is as important as the assignment itself.
“Punch those adjectives in that poem,” she says to a reciter. “Make them stand out. You’re a bright boy, you know you are and let me hear your bright boy’s voice big and strong!”
It is the next student’s turn. “’Wonderful World,’ by…” she begins.
“Mrs. Collins, I shall recite for you…” the correction comes.
“Mrs. Collins, I shall recite for you the poem…”
“We must learn to speak in complete sentences,” Collins says when the reciter is finished. “If we do not speak in complete sentences, we will not write in complete sentences. Children, if we do not speak in complete sentences, we will not what?”
“Write in complete sentences,” they finish for her.
“What must we do to write in complete sentences?”
“Speak in complete sentences.”
The extra work and higher expectations, Collins says, are useless without extra support and extra care.
“I put all work up on the wall, errors and all,” she says. “I’ll work with the errors anyway, and if I don’t put the work with errors on the wall, I’m just beating that child back down and telling him his best wasn’t good enough.”
“I think your teachers must like the top of your head,” Collins says to a young reciter. “You’re always looking down.” She lifts a chin. “I do this in my sleep sometimes,” she laughs, repeating the motion.
“Look at me, bright girl. I don’t want to see the top of your head, I want to see your bright face and those pretty eyes.”
Another student adds a word or even a line into the poem as he reads. “I love your creativity,” Collins says. “It didn’t say that the way he wrote it, and I love the way you created something else in it.”
The children must learn more than words in books and on papers.
“Remember The Wizard of Oz? How they already had what they were looking for? You already have everything you think you need. You’re unique! That person you admire; you have something they don’t have!
“You’re too bright to be a second-hander and do what someone else does when it’s wrong. You’re too bright to use drugs; you’re too bright to steal.”
Even when it’s necessary to lecture on improper behavior, there is no lack of support. “I love you,” she repeats while she works through the problem. “You’re my friend, but friends disagree sometimes.”
The extra effort from Collins is extra effort that can come from any adult who works with a child. Any teacher can support and push a child upward, to borrow one of her phrases; but they may choose not to try.
Although she doesn’t say so in so many words, the idea is that there’s nothing right with a child that an adult can’t make wrong and nothing wrong that an adult can’t make worse.
“If you don’t want to learn and you just sit there, and you don’t make a noise or cause trouble, you’ll be left alone. The teacher will let you sit there. But you won’t learn,” she said.
“It’s your right to fail, but it’s not your right to drag us down with you.”
As the younger children in the other classrooms line up for lunch, Collins sets her meal down to speak with them and to give and receive hugs. There are obviously perks to this job.
“Look at you,” she says to a little girl with glasses and a denim jumper. “You’re dressed just like her again,” she continues, and clasps the hands of a second girl. This one is shorter, with her hair in pigtails at the side.
“We’re twins!” the first girl pipes up.
“We’re going to be twins again tomorrow,” her friend says. Collins’ face lights up and she leads the pair around to the other adults working with her.
“Look at these two,” she says, beaming. “They’re dressed alike and they say they’re going to be twins again tomorrow. Lord love the children, keep the grownups away from these two.”
The twins, one shy with a freckle or two on her pale cheeks, the other with laughing brown eyes and a brilliant smile on her dark brown face, just keep smiling.
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