Thank you for clicking. I'd like to alert you to a way that you can support two causes that are very important to me personally and to progressives in general: math education and the future of Native American youth.
Yesterday, Urtica dioica gracilis posted a diary about the Klamath River Early College of the Redwoods, a public charter school serving Native American youth in Northern California. The students are in dire need of scientific calculators. Here's a link to their Amazon.com wishlist; they're also happy to take used scientific and graphing calculators, so if you have any lying around that you're not using you can send them to the address given on Amazon.
There was some response yesterday - seven orders were filled through Amazon and at least two other people left comments saying that they sent calculators they weren't using anymore. Unfortunately, the school still needs (by my count) at least fifteen more. I know the community has been hurting in this economy, and I know we can't afford to sponsor every worthy cause, but this is a very small request - it would take only about $300 in total to get them all the scientific calculators they need, and only a few hundred more to get them some graphing calculators. I think we should be able to do that.
Some of you may ask why the kids need calculators. Many of you grew up in a time when calculators did not exist or were prohibitively expensive, and you're not sure whether they have a place in grade schools. I sympathize; I don't think they have a place in the elementary levels at all except for some very few kids with specific learning disabilities.
However, this particular school is partnered with College of the Redwoods and enables students to earn a high school diploma and an associate's degree in four years - a truly laudable endeavor that, if successful, will enable the children there to compete with much more privileged kids coming out of college-prep programs at wealthy schools in the suburbs. But a program of this nature requires kids to take college-level math and science - subjects that cannot be taught properly without things like logarithms and exponential functions. Many of you remember using logarithm tables when you were learning college-level math. These are now difficult to obtain, and the books that contain them can be more expensive than the calculators the school is asking for.
I hope the DKos community can find it in our hearts and wallets to help these students out.
"This is the front line of our civil rights movement," says Wiki. "Past generations struggled first over rights to fish and hunt, and then to govern ourselves. Now we need to work on reclaiming ourselves through education."