Limeades for Learning

During September, Sonic was running a (heavily advertised) promotion for one of my favorite charities, Donors Choose. As you may recall, goal 16 is to donate at least $500.50 to classrooms in need through the site. Two weekends ago, when my family went golfing, we stopped at Sonic for breakfast, and everyone graciously gave me their Limeades for Learning codes. I thought it was a matching thing, so I wanted to wait until pay day to use them, but it turned out you use the codes to vote for your favorite projects and Sonic will choose the projects with the most votes that total half a million dollars and, you know, fund them. Still pretty cool.

So I used my four codes on projects that were lower down in the running, just to make the teachers feel like someone was actually paying attention to their proposals and thought they had good ideas. Then, while I was looking at a map of Yugoslavia on wikipedia to make sure I have the order of the countries down for the one-week-away-FSOT (Slovenia Croatia Bos/Hertz Serbia Montenegro Macedonia boom. Got it.), I remembered reading about the war in Bosnia (capital Sarajevo) and the genocide in Rwanda (capital Kigali) in Scholastic News. Weighty subjects for second-graders, to be sure, but those were the stories that stuck. All the rest have faded into a nebulous feeling of "Oh, I enjoyed reading Scholastic News," but Rwanda and Bosnia have stayed because they were powerful. I'm sure the magazine wouldn't have detailed the exact techniques being used, but I remembered feeling like I wasn't being talked down to about it; it felt really empowering that my teacher trusted me to be mature enough to read about a real-life war happening now, at a time when I was still supposed to want to play with my Barbies when I got home from school.

I'm hoping the magazine has maintained that integrity, because I donated to one proposal to bring Scholastic News into another second grade classroom today. JP Morgan Chase had already donated the first $400 of the project's needed $457.94, and as much as I would have liked to put in the whole last bit, I really need to take care of my credit bill first. I donated $25, figuring the remaining $33 would be an easy enough donation for someone else to make. Turns out, JPMC came back to finish funding the project (which also was for a school-year subscription to Time Kids)! I think it's interesting that everyone's all on about the taxpayer's bail-out money going to outrageous corporate bonuses - and I'm aware that donations like this are probably made in the interest of being a combination tax write-off/PR scheme - but the fact remains that some kids somewhere are being helped by this act. And hey, they could be keeping all the money for themselves.

Scholastic News being my pet project, I didn't actually donate to the ones I voted for Sonic to fund - yet. I'll reevaluate my finances in a week or two. In the meantime, here are the links:

Learning in a flash! asks for 30 2GB flashdrives to help students transport their work from the school computer lab to the classroom to home. As we all know, the price of memory has come down A LOT since I was in school (and paid $50 for my quarter-gig drive and another $50 for the eighth-of-a-gig SD card for my camera), so this whole project costs just $240 plus the site fees.

Meanwhile, this school newspaper needs new supplies. Journalism is a new elective in this New York City school, one that, like No Child Left Behind before it, is drastically underfunded. While I think that three laptops is maybe more than the bare minimum necessary for this project, I respect the teacher who wrote this proposal for choosing devices that are actually really economical and journalism textbooks to help enrich the kids' experience. At $70 a pop, it's no wonder the school couldn't afford to buy these! The whole cost to fund an entire journalism course - with materials that can surely be used for at least a few years to come - is only $2320... someone remind me why we're in Iraq again?

Everything I know about India, I learned by reading Salman Rushdie. Okay. Maybe that's an overstatement... but I definitely learned everything I know about Antigua from Jamaica Kincaid. Point is, books that introduce you to foreign cultures, historic landmarks, and inspire you to love reading for its own sake are awesome. Thus, my most-likely next donation candidate is "Solve a Mystery, Learn some History," which is asking for 31 titles of an acclaimed 5th-grade-level series of mystery books that introduce their readers to things and places as varied as the US Constitution and the Acropolis in Athens. The best part? Most of the books cost less than $7.50 each, so the entire proposal can be filled with $312, $125 of which has already been contributed.

Finally, I chose this bookshelf proposal, because. I mean. The kids don't have a BOOKSHELF in their classroom. Enough said.