Marva Collins' Pride, Fear, and Motivation

In this final post, I analyze Marva Collins' emotions as depicted in the movie The Marva Collins Story . 

The most obvious and sustaining emotion shown in the movie is her pride in her teaching methods and her students. She saw the vibrant potential in children that the public school system had written off as "problematic" or learning disabled. Her appraisal of those students' failure was radical: the failure was not in the students, but in the system that lacked faith. When the bureaucracy refused to change, she built her own solution, founding Westside Preparatory School. There, her pride was validated daily as she taught these very children to read Shakespeare and, more importantly, to believe in their own intellect and set high expectations for them. Her pride motivated her to consistently invest effort in her teaching. 

This deep-seated pride was what made a particular scene in the movie so profoundly powerful. It is the moment her husband told her a crushing truth at the end of the first year of their school: their personal funds had run out, and the school could not continue financially. In this moment, we see a crack in the pillar of confidence. 

Marva Collins was checking the bills

But significantly, she does not feel any shame or guilt. These self-conscious emotions rely on an appraisal of personal failure. Shame is like"I am a bad person," and guilt is like"I made a terrible mistake." Marva’s conscience was clear. She knew that she had tried harder than anyone. She had successfully taught the "unteachable" students to read, write, and develop. She had convinced skeptical parents to trust her and send their children to her school. She was keen that she had done nothing wrong. The problem was not a moral or professional failing, but simply a lack of money.

Instead, what she experienced was fear and upset. The fear and upset were not for herself, but for her students. She was afraid that those students had to go back to their previous public schools, where they could not succeed. She was upset that her students' newly forged confidence would be cracked and their learning progress would be stopped. However, because of her pride and confidence in her students, she honestly shared the bad news with them, and she motivated them to stay strong and keep learning. 

Yet, the moment of despair became a turning point. A journalist discovered Westside Prep and wrote about Marva’s revolutionary philosophy and the success of her "unteachable" students. The public response was immediate and overwhelming. Donations poured in from across the country. Marva Collins' fear and upset were gone, and she was finally able to continue to work for her students with her love and passion. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marva Collins's Self-Efficacy and How She Developed Her Students' Self-Efficacy

Image
     Self-efficacy , which refers to an individual's belief in their own capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments , has been examined to be a meaningful predictor of people's success. In this post, we utilize theories of self-efficacy to understand  Marva Collins's  foundation of her own belief and how she  fostered her students' self-efficacy and achievement.  The Sources of Marva's Self-Efficacy      Marva Collins's powerful sense of self-efficacy was built in her childhood when her grandmother taught her how to read before school age, and her father consistently encouraged her to break the discrimination towards Black people and establish her career. Identified by Albert Bandura and other psychologists, the four key sources are previous  mastery experiences ,  observations of similar others performing the same behavior ,  verbal persuasion  from others, and  emotional...
Read more

Marva Collins's Emotional Appraisals in the Process of Building Her School

Image
After moving from her hometown, Alabama, to Chicago, Marva Collins worked as a teacher at a public elementary school in Chicago. It was here that she encountered the widespread  neglect and low expectations placed on Black and low-income students, and therefore, she was determined to establish her own school (Westside Preparatory School) and apply her teaching methods.  In this post, we’ll dissect Marva Collins’s emotional journey as depicted in the 1981 film  The Marva Collins Story and her book Marva Collins' Way. We will  trace her initial frustration, her determined reappraisals during struggle, and her ultimate goal validation to reveal how her inner dialogue built an educational revolution. Movie: The Marva Collins Story Before Building Her School: The Appraisals of Frustration That Forged her Goal Marva’s initial appraisals as a teacher in the Chicago public school system gave rise to her frustration and anger towards conventional education. Her primary...
Read more

Marva Collins: Her Revolutionized Motivations for the "Unteachable" Kids

Image
  Born on August 31, 1936, in Monroeville, Alabama, Marva Collins was a pioneering American educator.  She earned a Bachelor's degree in Secretarial Sciences from Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University). After moving to Chicago, she became a highly effective medical secretary before fulfilling her dream to teach, eventually spending 14 years in the Chicago Public Schools system.   In the 1970s, Chicago's public schools were widely considered to be  in a state of crisis. Classrooms were overcrowded, resources were thin, and a pervasive culture of low expectations plagued the system. Specifically, the children from low-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods were often mislabeled as "learning disabled," "disadvantaged," or "unteachable," "incapable of high achievement." However, it was Marva Collins who was brave enough to declare a radical idea: the problem was not the children; it was the teaching. With a firm belief in students...
Read more