You Beautiful People!

Thanks to the overwhelming generosity of you wonderful readers, I now have a year's supply of loose leaf paper for my classroom! Hooray!

I also have enough donations left over to purchase many of the book titles that got axed off my requisition! I can get them on the secondary market much cheaper. I'm going to have more students than I had last year, so oh WOW I am so glad to be able to get more books!

There were some frequently asked questions about my shameless plea. I'm only too obliged to answer:

1. How can a school not supply its teachers with loose leaf paper? Isn't that a staple?

It is a staple! So the only reason I can give you that my school district will supply staples like staples and not staples like paper is just sheer perverseness. We can get loose leaf paper (maybe), but the process is ridiculously lengthy -- involving competing bidders, etc. -- and not always met with success. It's easier to scout for it in thrift stores, which is what most of us teachers do. I don't ask the students to bring it, because it's not fair to take from those who brought, and distribute to those who didn't. The students themselves call that one out.

2. Why do you need so many books? What happened to last year's books?

My friends, I have a classroom library that runs on the honor system. My students are poor, and the school has multiple places where they can accrue fines, including the library and the cafeteria. I am not going to fill out a fine card for a poor kid to replace a paperback book that was half falling apart. This honor system works pretty well, actually. There's no downright theft.

Several things happen to my classroom library books, in no particular order:

*Faeries take them.
*They disappear under students' beds with lots of other stuff (including homework).
*Kids like the books and give them to friends whose teachers don't have that book in their classroom.
*They go to the gym and get locked in a locker.
*They get left behind on benches. Someone else picks them up.
*They get read so much that they fall apart.

I am not an average 9th grade English teacher whose students arrive in my class prepared to read pithy classic literature. My first priority is to improve student literacy. Now, I don't know about you, but I like to read books that I can identify with. It stands to reason that teenagers of color would want to do the same. So the books in my classroom library are for those kids. I curate my titles carefully. Some of the books are so easy to read that an enterprising second grader could whip through them. Those books (also about teenagers, it's a whole genre) are for my students who speak English as a second language. Many students have told me they never read a whole book until they came to my classroom.

EXHIBIT: TESTIMONIAL, SORRY IT'S HARD TO READ

Circling back around, I want to thank you again for your donations. Please email me your address, because you will get a paper letter you can use for your income taxes!

May all the Gods and Goddesses of multiple pantheons running deep into the tunnels of time bless you and keep you!

Your most grateful servant,
ANNE
annejohnson17211@gmail.com