Inside this book – Most often when kids are behind—say, when they’re repeating a grade—they’re given dumbed-down material on the assumption that they can’t handle more. That idea comes from the fixed mindset: These students are dim-witted, so they need the same simple things drummed into them over and over. Well, the results are depressing.

Students repeat the whole grade without learning any more than they knew before. Instead, Marva Collins took inner-city Chicago kids who had failed in the public schools and treated them like geniuses. Many of them had been labeled “learning disabled,” “retarded,” or “emotionally disturbed.” Virtually all of them were apathetic.

Now updated with new research—the book that has changed millions of lives After decades of research, world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol.

No light in the eyes, no hope in the face. Collins’s second-grade public school class started out with the lowest-level reader there was. By June, they reached the middle of the fifth-grade reader, studying Aristotle, Aesop, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Poe, Frost, and Dickinson along the way.

Later when she started her own school, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Zay Smith dropped in. He saw four-year-olds writing sentences like “See the physician” and “Aesop wrote fables,” and talking about “diphthongs” and “diacritical marks.” He observed second graders reciting passages from Shakespeare, Longfellow, and Kipling. Radeon 6470m kext helper.

Shortly before, he had visited a rich suburban high school where many students had never heard of Shakespeare. “Shoot,” said one of Collins’s students, “you mean those rich high school kids don’t know Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616?” Students read huge amounts, even over the summer. One student, who had entered as a “retarded” six-year-old, now four years later had read twenty-three books over the summer, including A Tale of Two Cities and Jane Eyre. The students read deeply and thoughtfully.

As the three- and four-year- olds were reading about Daedalus and Icarus, one four-year-old exclaimed, “Mrs. Collins, if we do not learn and work hard, we will take an Icarian flight to nowhere.” Heated discussions of Macbeth were common. Alfred Binet believed you could change the quality of someone’s mind.

Clearly you can. Whether you measure these children by the breadth of their knowledge or by their performance on standardized tests, their minds had been transformed. Benjamin Bloom, an eminent educational researcher, studied 120 outstanding achievers. They were concert pianists, sculptors, Olympic swimmers, world-class tennis players, mathematicians, and research neurologists. Most were not that remarkable as children and didn’t show clear talent before their training began in earnest.

Even by early adolescence, you usually couldn’t predict their future accomplishment from their current ability. Only their continued motivation and commitment, along with their network of support, took them to the top.

1st Review – Listened to this book with my whole family. It was amazing how much my kid got into it. We have always strongly embraced an effort toward progress overall. I think the most valuable thing this book provided was an opportunity to see that work and effort not innate ability are the keys to success in every area of our lives.