Further Adventures For High School Imaginations

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

I'm a Special Education teacher at a high school in the South Bronx. Besides the classes that I co-teach, I’m the adviser for our Science Fiction Club. Our club's activities include an organized Dungeons and Dragons game held weekly on-campus for students who maintain passing grades in all their classes. If you're even remotely familiar with the game you understand that, while there is a wealth of benefits to be gained from playing, it is not the cheapest hobby one can have. And for the kids who are involved, the cost of just one or two of the game books required to play it is outside of their means. D&D is a game of imagination. Its players act out roles and identities beyond the mundane world they live in. The students find the fantasy world of D&D utterly captivating, wanting to read more to discovery what they can about it. The game teaches teamwork, moral and ethical lessons, math skills, and reading comprehension, as well as expanding its players' vocabularies and their creativity. What we need are the resources to help our game continue and expand. We are seeking a selection of the essential books needed to play D&D in order to create a small library to be kept at school. Students will always have the material they need in order to play, and money will no longer be a reason that they miss out on this rich and entertaining experience. The kids in the club live in an environment that seems to limit their potential. They see few people achieve much of anything. Their world is what exists in a few blocks around their apartment. D&D is a gateway to a bigger, better future. In less than a year, through gaming I've seen special education and general education students alike seek out the D&D manuals and novels, devouring each word as quickly as they could. Players tell their friends about our games, and each week more people come to my office asking to join. Blossoming artists are drawing scenes from their adventures and young writers are scribing tales that may one day become their own legends, told to a new generation of D&D players. This may seem like a small, frivolous thing, but it isn't. Helping to secure these books for the kids in our Sci-Fi Club is a huge thing, and we need your help making it happen.