Marva Collins Quotes

Trust yourself. Think for yourself. Act for yourself. Speak for yourself. Be yourself. Imitation is suicide.

To quote the exceptional teacher Marva Collins, "I will is more important than IQ." It is wonderful to have a terrific mind, but it's been my experience that having outstanding intelligence is a very small part of the total package that leads to success and happiness. Discipline, hard work, perserverance, and generosity of spirit are, in the final analysis, far more important.

I'm a teacher. A teacher is someone who leads. There is no magic here. I do not walk on water. I do not part the sea. I just love children.

What all good teachers have in common, however, is that they set high standards for their students and do not settle for anything less.

There is a brilliant child locked inside every student.

If you can’t make a mistake, you can’t make anything.

Character is what you know you are, not what others think you have.

Determination and perseverance move the world; thinking that others will do it for you is a sure way to fail.

Determination and perseverance move the world; thinking that others will do it for you is a sure way to fall.

If you can't make a mistake, you can't make anything.

Peace will always rule the day where reason rules the mind.

Why?” “Because we make the best use of a limited resource by helping those at the bottom to move up,” she said. “Not by giving those at the top more advantages.

Children should be taught to learn from failure and to correct it in the future. Do not judge or punish. That will not help your child mature or to learn how to think. Like Marva Collins, tell your children the truth. Give them the tools to solve problems.

Shoe-string operations. Poor people have the least but pay the most.

Hard to get anybody to learn something when their paycheck depends on ignorance

Our biggest challenges as teachers involve getting students to unlearn the things they think they know.

If you have no reason to look, there’s very little chance you can see,

When it comes to the administration, don’t attribute to malice that which can be completely explained by stupidity.

You don’t get good people by sitting on them. You get good people by keeping them interested, challenged, and paid well for their time. It’s a strictly capitalist exchange.

When things get ugly, it’s easy to focus on the thing in front of you instead of the situation that put it there in the first place.

We each see history through our own lens. If something happened before I was born, it’s history. If I remember when it started, it’s not.

My mother used to say something about controlling the rhetoric. If you can define the terms, you’re halfway to winning the argument.

Go in with your eyes and ears open. The cognitive dissonance will let you know when you’ve seen something you didn’t expect.

what do you do when you fulfill your dream and find it isn’t enough

He’s one of those men who’s sure he has all the answers, and he does. Maude love him. He’s got answers to everything. Unfortunately, he has no idea what questions they go with.

Doing the right thing doesn’t mean not making mistakes. It means owning them and finding ways to mitigate the fallout. It means continuing, even when the easy thing is to quit. To throw up your hands and walk away.

Hard to see the whole when you’re blinded by the details, sar?

I may see more here because I’m familiar enough with what’s normal to spot what’s not.

I’m having to question all my assumptions on this voyage.” She nodded and motioned to the plates. “It’s good for ya.

I have a lot of questions. Mostly about what I’m missing because my preconceptions are blinders. I’m focusing on what I think I know and missing everything else.

We’re showing them a world that cannot exist because it’s not compatible with the one they live in.

You don’t get to pick your tragedies, but everybody has them.

Do you need me to spell it out for you in words small enough for a captain to understand?

Never underestimate the potential for personal power to overwhelm good business sense.

I can’t promise the answers you need, but I’ll give you the ones that I have.

I’m sure I can’t imagine it, but what I can imagine is bad enough.

Sure, you couldn’t make it work and the hundreds of people who tried before weren’t able to either, but I’m special and I can do it’ mentality.

Something always happens next. If you’re expecting it, it’s less likely to be an unpleasant surprise.

The ship only carried only enough

Pick a path before someone picks one for you.

Lost? On the ship?” “It’s possible.” I shrugged. “New crew especially. By the time you get to be an officer, one hopes that ‘getting lost’ becomes ‘impromptu inspection.

But are challenge and love enough? Not quite. All great teachers teach students how to reach the high standards. Collins and Esquith didn’t hand their students a reading list and wish them bon voyage. Collins’s students read and discussed every line of Macbeth in class. Esquith spent hours planning what chapters they would read in class. “I know which child will handle the challenge of the most difficult paragraphs, and carefully plan a passage for the shy youngster … who will begin his journey as a good reader. Nothing is left to chance.… It takes enormous energy, but to be in a room with young minds who hang on every word of a classic book and beg for more if I stop makes all the planning worthwhile.” What are they teaching the students en route? To love learning. To eventually learn and think for themselves. And to work hard on the fundamentals. Esquith’s class often met before school, after school, and on school vacations to master the fundamentals of English and math, especially as the work got harder. His motto: “There are no shortcuts.” Collins echoes that idea as she tells her class, “There is no magic here. Mrs. Collins is no miracle worker. I do not walk on water, I do not part the sea. I just love children and work harder than a lot of people, and so will you.” DeLay expected a lot from her students, but she, too, guided them there. Most students are intimidated by the idea of talent, and it keeps them in a fixed mindset. But DeLay demystified talent. One student was sure he couldn’t play a piece as fast as Itzhak Perlman. So she didn’t let him see the metronome until he had achieved it. “I know so surely that if he had been handling that metronome, as he approached that number he would have said to himself, I can never do this as fast as Itzhak Perlman, and he would have stopped himself.” Another student was intimidated by the beautiful sound made by talented violinists. “We were working on my sound, and there was this one note I played, and Miss DeLay stopped me and said, ‘Now that is a beautiful sound.’ ” She then explained how every note has to have a beautiful beginning, middle, and end, leading into the next note. And he thought, “Wow! If I can do it there, I can do it everywhere.” Suddenly the beautiful sound of Perlman made sense and was not just an overwhelming concept. When students don’t know how to do something and others do, the gap seems unbridgeable. Some educators try to reassure their students that they’re just fine as they are. Growth-minded teachers tell students the truth and then give them the tools to close the gap. As Marva Collins said to a boy who was clowning around in class, “You are in sixth grade and your reading score is 1.1. I don’t hide your scores in a folder. I tell them to you so you know what you have to do. Now your clowning days are over.” Then they got down to work.

You think I’m a masochist? Or a sadist?

one of the best ways to win an argument is to not have it to begin with.

When you discover you’re digging yourself into a hole, the wise choice is to put the shovel down,

Do you have any real doubts?” I shook my head. “No. I don’t. That’s usually a sign that I’ve completely underestimated the nature of the task.

It’s all temporary, David. It’s what we do with the time we have that matters.

None of us around this table is going to try to tell you how to do your job.” Alys cleared her throat and gave Pip a look. Pip laughed. “All right. Other than the commandant, nobody around this table is going to try to tell you how to do your job.

As a longtime student in the school of constantly overthinking everything, I knew I was probably overthinking everything.

Is that good or bad, Mr. Bentley?” “Yes, sar. It is.