My Kids Need a Hero. Good News: She Already Exists!
My students need a class set of "I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban."
$777 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
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.
Back at Thanksgiving I told my students the story of Malala Yousafzai based on an interview I saw her do with John Stewart. Her brief story inspired my kids to be thankful for what they already had. The more I read of her book the more I realized they needed to hear it all. They need a hero.
My students live in a bubble.
It is often said of our community that one who is born here will also die here. They live an hour from the mountains, the beach and the desert and yet most have never left the city limits. We are in our own little world - for better or for worse. I recently asked them how we could improve their school. Most had no answers which broke my heart. Our school offers them very little. Few electives, few field trips, few hopes for higher education and yet, to my kids, it is fine because they don't know any different.
On the bright side of that there's nothing particularly bad about our school or community either. Our kids are safe and have some excellent teachers. Everything, though, is just terribly routine. There's no spark here. Most kids just show up and go through their day. They're not encouraged to dream. Our district is happy if they just show up each day and eventually finish high school.
Okay, so maybe that is pretty bad
My Project
My students need a hero - someone who can inspire them to dream. Malala can be that hero. She is a young woman who, in the worst of circumstances, never stopped dreaming. She saw the great value in education and put her very life on the line to defend it.
I read my students the prologue of the book a few weeks ago and they were enraptured. Many of them asked if they could borrow the book from me - so many that I bought an additional copy just for them. The line to read it is already 11 kids long (and that's just my homeroom!)
Every year my 8th graders write "I Am" autobiographies. It is often the longest thing my kids have ever written at that point (10 whole paragraphs, oh no!) and is a true challenge for them.
Next year I want them to read Malala's first and be inspired.
10 pages of the book left some of my kids in tears - I can only imagine what the whole book will do.
It will, at the very least, take them out of their bubble. The book does an amazing job of transporting the reader to a very foreign world - something my kids desperately need.
More importantly, they will be inspired. They will have a hero. Someone like them in so many ways but who broke out of her routine and truly changed the world.
They will be able to boldly claim "I am <insert name here>!"
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mr. Roughton and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
