In honor of National Teacher Appreciation Week, this story from Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, illustrates the power of your noble profession. This is only a small token of my esteem for teachers' talents and immeasurable contributions to society.
One Great Teacher
Marva Collins taught Chicago children who had been judged and discarded. For many, her classroom was their last stop. One boy had been in and out of thirteen schools in four years. One stabbed children with pencils and had been thrown out of a mental health center. One eight-year-old would remove the blade from the pencil sharpener and cut up his classmates’ coats, hats, gloves, and scarves. One child referred to killing himself in almost every sentence. One hit another student with a hammer on his first day. These children had not learned much in school, but everyone knew it was their own fault. Everyone but Collins.
When 60 Minutes did a segment on Collins’s classroom, Morley Safer tried his best to get a child to say he didn’t like the school. “It’s so hard here. There’s no recess. There’s no gym. You have only forty minutes for lunch. Why do you like it? It’s just too hard.” But the student replied, “That’s why I like it, because it makes your brains bigger.”
Chicago Sun-Times writer Zay Smith interviewed one of the children: “We do hard things here. They fill your brain.”
As Collins looks back on how she got started, she says, “I have always been fascinated with learning, with the process of discovering something new, and it was exciting to share in the discoveries made by my … students.” On the first day of school, she always promised her students—all students—that they would learn. She forged a contract with them.
“I know that most of you can’t spell your names. You don’t know the alphabet, you don’t know how to read, you don’t know homonyms or how to syllabicate. I promise you that you will.
“None of you has ever failed. School may have failed you. Well, goodbye to failure, children. Welcome to success. You will read hard books in here and understand what you read. You will write every day … But you must help me to help you. If you don’t give anything, don’t expect anything. Success is not coming to you; you must come to it.”
Marva Collins set extremely high standards, right from the start. She introduced words and concepts that were, at first, way above what her students could grasp. Yet on Day One, she established an atmosphere of genuine affection and concern as she promised students they would produce: “I’m gonna love you … I love you already, and I’m going to love you even when you don’t love yourself.”
Her joy in her students’ learning was enormous. As they changed from children who arrived with “toughened faces and glassed-over eyes” to children who were beginning to brim with enthusiasm, she told them, “I don’t know what St. Peter has planned for me, but you children are giving me my heaven on earth.”