Marva Collins: Students model student excellence

By. Vicki T. LeeSpecial to the NNPA from Afro NewspapersMarva Collins is depressed about what’s happening with children in the nation’s public schools.”Not much is expected of our children,” Collins said. ”All I hear is, ‘What’s wrong with the parents?’ Parents don’t know where excellence is. If parents knew what was going on in the schools, there would be a revolution.”Excellence is the goal Collins set for herself years ago when, fed up with the public school system, she yanked her own children out of their ”prestigious” schools and opened the Westside Preparatory School in Chicago. She developed her own ”Read-by-Three” reading program, set moral and disciplinary standards and began a program of actually teaching students.”Excellence knows no bounds [and] if you concentrate on excuses, that’s where your work ethics lie!”Collins lives excellence, breathes it and thrives on the opportunity for her students to benefit from it, but she doesn’t hide her motives. She wants something back. ”Every child in that school knows that they represent me.” To students, she says: ”If I can’t stamp you like a piece of USDA meat, don’t tell anybody you went to my school.””Having a good education means being able to universally communicate everywhere,” Collins said. ”Our students attend Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Dartmouth and are selected to study at Oxford every year,” adding that that would be impossible with just local skills. ”We have to be global citizens,” Collins said. To accomplish this, Collins devotes most of her time to teaching herself. ”I feel I’m going to die illiterate,” Collins said.”I read voraciously, 30 to 40 books each month, self-help books, books about great philosophers, books about peace confrontation. I’m a leader and a thinker. If you’re not born wealthy, you certainly better be very bright. My mission every morning is to be the best person I can be.”She expects the same from her students, and no excuses.”Empty wagons always make a lot of noise,” Collins said, adding that if teachers put something in children, they are less likely to act out. But if they do, it’s her policy to ”discipline our children with nobility.””When children misbehave, they have to write 100 times why they are doing what they did, in perfect handwriting or speak it, ‘I have just hit a child. I am not going to be indolent.”’Students in Collins’ schools learn the importance of accountability for their choices and consequences for their actions, along with a stringent curriculum in the classics, Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, philosophical ideas, etc.”We are what we learn,” Collins said, and she doesn’t allow dollar signs or student issues to determine or undermine excellence in her classrooms. ”I don’t teach poor children, I teach scholars.”What teachers need to do, Collins suggested, is ”get rid of the shop talk, get rid of all the workbooks, cover the chalkboards and start teaching children. It’s all about language, brains and language. I never hit or curse at kids. I don’t argue with children. When you get angry at a kid in the classroom, you’ve lost the entire class. You have already shown them your worst side. When I get a difficult child, I say, what’s wrong with me that I can’t help this child?”That’s difficult to find, she said. It’s always about not enough materials, what’s wrong with the child? ”I haven’t heard yet from the teachers, ‘what’s wrong with me?””’When we use excuses, we don’t get to be all we were born to be,” Dr. Collins said. ”I don’t do this for the children. I do this to practice my own excellence. They benefit because they have allowed me to practice my excellence on them.”