Journal of No. 118

I gave to this proposal for a Carson high school to get copies of "How to Read Literature Like a Professor" for the honors and AP literature students. There's just $125 to go to get it fully funded, so do what you can, or find some other worthy project. (PS thank you Wasserman Foundation for your matching gift)

I also finished off a modest request from a quasi-local elementary school for pencils and an electric pencil sharpener. Freaking pencils. Okay, so the teacher splurged and put some colored pencils on the shopping list, but still. Half the projects on Donorschoose seem to be for digital projectors and iPads, while then there are teachers trying to get paper and pencils.

"Also, Dude, colored pencils is not the preferred nomenclature. African American pencils, please."

Love Kaia One of the thank-you notes from DonorsChoose

Always neat to get the thank-you notes from DonorsChoose. This was from a project called "Cooking with Fairy Tales". The kids had been experimenting with apples and apple sauce as one of the first projects, and sent art and notes along. Dr. Pookie and I liked this one in particular due to the unusual green and purple one-eyed aliens, which look like they should have been produced in Milano's recent awesome-sauce experiment teaching children to create religious icons of the Great Old Ones.
However, evidence from other artists suggests that the green and purple dudes are actually balalaikas or some similar stringed instrument. Anyway, to up your Awww quotient...

Thank you for giveing our class money for cooking supplies. I had fun. We made apple sauce. We read Snow White and the 7 drawfs. We ate apples. And we ate red yellow and green apples. We looked at the apples.

We read Snow Whie and it was fun but it was a little scary.

We cut apples with knives and we read Snow White.

Educational publisher Townsend Press has donated $1 million to DonorsChoose.org, which helps ordinary folks like you and me help out teachers in the public schools, by donating money for supplies. The money from Townsend is being used to partially fund all of the book-related projects down to under $100, making it easier to get these projects fully funded.

I seem to be posting like crazy today, but this one's at least in a good cause. I've updated my DonorsChoose list of projects to aid classrooms:

Check it out.

The "Classic Graphic Novels for Middle School Students" project looks more like they'll sit on a shelf rather than be part of the curriculum, but it would put two copies of "Graphic Classics, Volume 10: Horror Classics Edgar Allan Poe, Saki, Jack London, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith" within a few feet of small children!

Other projects put Bram Stoker, HG Wells, or Greek mythology in the classrooms. Art boards for sketching downtown LA, croquet sets for physics... I can satisfy all your giving needs. Or if I can't, you can search the site for projects you like even more.

I've made my own Challenge as part of Donors Choose. I've added a few teacher-projects for your benevolent perusal. Please go have a look and help a teacher or two.

--Mike