Hello! I teach two sections, consisting wholly of Special Education students, of ninth grade Sociology. Because California only requires three years of high school social studies, this Sociology class is sort-of a, catch-all to help prepare freshmen to excel in the rest of their high school careers; emphasizing literacy, study skills, learning methods, and organizational skills. Therefore, it's not technically a "Sociology" class -- it's more like literacy, Ethnic Studies, life skills, and human geography classes all rolled into one excellent package. I work at Skyline High School, which is a school of about 2200 students in the VERY high-needs Oakland Unified School District in Oakland, California. A significant number of students at this school receive free and reduced-priced lunches, and although the school physically is located in one of the wealthiest areas of Oakland, most of the students who attend it bus in from all over the city. In addition to this urban poverty and its associated detriments to my students' education, each and every one of my students has been identified as a student who requires Special Education services. Some of my students are more motivated or organized than others, but all of them benefit greatly from more tactile learning methods. So far this year, I have emphasized active reading, employing the strategies of "Passage Mapping" and "Talking to the Text," which require students to write on their texts to engage the material. I would like to push my students this year and use the novel "Roots" as a platform from which the students will work on a family genealogy research project, as well as a way to bring to life both human geography and ethnic studies: human geography, by detailing foreign lands and migration patterns, and ethnic studies, by chronicling fictionalized accounts of a minority American family through the generations. I would love for my students to each have their own copies of this book, not only because I believe it is an incredibly valuable piece of American literature that would be great for their personal libraries, but, more importantly, because they have benefited immensely from physically engaging with their texts so far this year. I strongly believe that they will have a much easier time learning this material and will learn much more from it if they are able to write on their texts, whether it's writing margin notes, circling unknown vocabulary, or asking themselves questions about the reading. This tactile engagement is especially important for my special education students, because learning the material in a variety of ways helps reach them in ways that their various disabilities might otherwise hamper. Please consider funding this project. Doing so would give my students an opportunity to not only claim ownership of a valuable scholastic item (which so many of them have never really been able to do), but, more importantly, would dramatically enhance their abilities to comprehend and analyze this important work of American literature and provide a great stepping stone to discussing other Social Studies issues. Thank you so much for your consideration! Have a great day! =]