And now for something completely different
posted in Blogging, Miscellaneous, School |Over at ScienceBlogs, they’re doing a blog challenge with DonorsChoose. The Questionable Authority has an especially impassioned plea.
DonorsChoose is an organization where teachers across the country can submit a project with a wishlist for funding. Donors can shop the projects, select one that resonates, and then provide funds–any portion of the requested amount.
DonorsChoose is doing a blog challenge for the month of October, and yours truly, OmegaMom, has decided to toss her hat into the ring to see if I can get my readers to pony up some funding for some very simple requests.
I’ve selected three projects. One is a teacher who would like to have a heavy-duty electric pencil sharpener for her classroom. Another is a teacher who needs staplers. A third is a teacher who needs dry-erasers for her whiteboards.
Now. Just sit there and think about this for a little while. Pencil sharpeners. Staplers. Dry erasers.
We’re not talking particle accelerators here. Nothing fancy. Nothing that requires large amounts of money. Pretty basic supplies.
In fact, the amounts needed for these projects are so small that it makes me sad. My stapler teacher needs $134 for a bunch of heavy-duty staplers to use in the classroom. The teacher who wants the pencil sharpener has used manual sharpeners and has previously snagged one from a closing school (!!), and they keep breaking. The dry-eraser person made his/her own white boards for the students a few years ago, but needs a constant supply of markers and erasers.
Help OmegaMom buy staplers, pencil sharpeners, and dry erasers at DonorsChoose. I’m going to stick my donation thermometer over in the sidebar. OmegaMom gets an average of about 100 readers per day; if each of my readers dropped $5.20 into the donation bin, these three teachers would get their projects funded.
Don’t get me started, though, on the sad commentary this makes on the amount of money spent on, say, NCLB versus plain teaching supplies…grrr.
(Ahem. Just realized that this could be construed as an attempt to guilt my readers into dropping $$. Naw, please don’t feel pressured, it’s an experiment. Whatever we collect will be more than $0 [I'm dropping a few dollars myself], so that’s all too the good.)
(Also, I’d like to clarify #34 in my last post–it reads as if I were saying that bloggers who are similar in thought/tone as yourself [me] aren’t interesting. Ahem. Not at all what I meant–I meant to include the second group as “interesting bloggers who are not similar in tone or style or thought as yourself”. Now I’ll go somewhere and write 100 times on a blackboard, “I will try to write more clearly.”)
