Marva Collins
Trust yourself. Think for yourself. Act for yourself. Speak for yourself. Be yourself. Imitation is suicide.Collection: Happiness
Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.Collection: Love
Excellence is not an act but a habit. The things you do the most are the things you will do best.Collection: Strength
When someone is taught the joy of learning, it becomes a life-long process that never stops, a process that creates a logical individual. That is the challenge and joy of teaching.Collection: Teaching
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.Collection: Education
Success doesn't come to you, you go to it.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Education
There is a brilliant child locked inside every student.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Teacher
Determination and perseverance move the world; thinking that others will do it for you is a sure way to fail.Collection: Perseverance
Mr. Meant-to has a friend, his name is Didn't-Do. Have you met them? They live together in a house called Never-Win. And I am told that it is haunted by the Ghost of Might-have-Been.Collection: Winning
What all good teachers have in common, however, is that they set high standards for their students and do not settle for anything less.Collection: Teacher
If you don't give anything, don't expect anything. Success is not coming to you, you must come to it.Collection: Encouragement
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.Collection: Children
We've been brainwashed into thinking that it takes more monies than it actually does to educate children. That's been one of the brainwash jobs.Collection: Jobs
Kids don't fail. Teachers fail, school systems fail. The people who teach children that they are failures, they are the problem.Collection: Teacher
If you can't make a mistake, you can't make anything.Collection: Inspirational
People have to live by rules in the world. Why do we pretend in school that they don't?Collection: School
Character is what you know you are, not what others think you have.Collection: Leadership
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.Collection: Education
Before I can effectively discipline students, I have to earn their friendship and respect.Collection: Discipline
An error means a child needs help, not a reprimand or ridicule for doing something wrong.Collection: Children
Readers are leaders. Thinkers succeed.Collection: Success
The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior.Collection: Teacher
That's how I try to think of education - a school is a miniature society where children learn to function in a real world.Collection: Children
None of you has ever failed. School may have failed you. Goodbye to failure, children. Welcome to success.Collection: Goodbye
Praise is essential in developing the right attitude toward learning and toward school.Collection: Attitude
Excellence is not an act, but a habit.Collection: Motivational Sports
I have discovered few learning disabled students in my three decades of teaching. I have, however, discovered many, many victims of teaching inabilities.Collection: Teaching
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.Collection: Kids
Everything works when the teacher works. It's as easy as that, and as hard.Collection: Teacher
I don't have to be accountable to some authority, which is why I don't take federal funds. I don't want anyone's monies unless they're monies without strings attached. It's not that we don't need them.Collection: Strings Attached
A person cannot all of a sudden become good at what they do just by switching streams.Collection: Switching
Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind.Collection: Children
You can pay people to teach, But you can't pay them to care.Collection: Teacher
I cannot change the world, but I do not have to conform.Collection: World
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."Collection: Jesus
When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Children
I got so tired of hearing those proverbs when I was a child. Now I use them all the time. Sometimes they are the best way to say what needs to be said. I teach them to my students. I have a collection of proverbs for class discussion and writing assignments.Collection: Children
There isn't a certain time we should set aside to talk about God. God is part of our every waking momentCollection: Waking
Teaching children to read was one thing; keeping them interested in reading was something else.Collection: Education
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."Collection: Children
Education is the thing. This black-white bit - I don't deal with people that way. I deal with it as if you are another individual. If you do something that perturbs me or aggravates me, I do not think you've done it because I'm black.Collection: Thinking
[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.Collection: Kids
Our children learn the phonetic method, which is why they're very good spellers, I suppose. Because rather than ABC or just saying a word, they'll have to go a as in apple and all the other a's there are in the English language. They learn that when they're four. Children all over America can tell you that a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y are vowels. But you ask them about that "sometimes y," and they can't tell you.Collection: Children
I'm not one of those who say this is the way. I'm not that opinionated. I can only say this is my way. Even the $1,000 scholarship that my son could have gotten from the state of Illinois to go to college, we didn't want. I'd rather get out and work and have my children know that their money comes from their parents and we have to work for it.Collection: Children
The purpose of a liberal arts education is to learn that a person can like both cats and dogs.Collection: Dog
Death cannot put the brakes on a good dream.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Children