Past projects 22
Great Books for Great Kids
Funded Jan 27, 2012Dear Donor
Thank you for taking to time to donate to my classroom. Our school’s budget, like every other school in our District, has been eroding over the last few years, but I can’t recall a time when it has been this bad. Books for English classes are often last priorities for the budget. Ironically, textbooks purchased by our District are in abundance, but these books often go unused, especially by my population of kids, because they are simply not appropriate for these students. Your donation is an opportunity to bring rigorous and fascinating content for students to think deeply about. Our program allows them the opportunity to think about the themes of the book in relation to broader philosophical content. Specifically, next year our students who read your donation will be asked to consider ideas such as Postmodern literary aesthetics and deferred meaning (an absence of Truth) and intertextuality in relation to Richard Rorty’s notions of (re)descriptive language. This is rigorous work for our seniors, but novels such as The Crying of Lot 49 give them the content they need to thoughtfully evaluate their world. Thank you again for your thought. ”
With gratitude,
Mr. Firestein
This classroom project was brought to life by Wasserman Foundation and 29 other donors.Community Improvement and Service Learning
Funded Oct 15, 2008I can't believe, with the way things are right now, you spent the resources to help my kids. This is the seventh year I've done a service-learning project with this population of students. One of the things I try to get them to believe is when they have the initiative to bring good into the world, the world will conspire to help them do it. This not only affirms my words, but this reaffirms my faith in people. I hope to bring this back to my class. We'll be able to use these cameras for many, many years, and I've all ready started devising new ways of using them to help them learn and inspire them to grow. Thank you so, so much for believing in us.
Best,
Jaso”
With gratitude,
Mr. Firestein