The cost of these books is $469, including shipping and <a target="new" href="http://www.donorschoose.org/html/fulfillment.htm" onclick="g_openWindow('http://www.donorschoose.org/html/fulfillment.htm', 300, 800, 'fulfillwindow');return false;">fulfillment</a>.
"Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance." Lyndon B. Johnson
I am a Literature teacher at Cross Cultural Environmental Leadership (XCEL) Academy, a public high school in San Francisco. Our school has been teaching "at-risk" students in a successful learning environment for 3 years.
I believe that it is important to teach students to know their hearts and use their minds well. We prepare them to live productive, socially useful, and personally satisfying lives with an academic program that stresses intellectual development and social involvement in our society. I have developed a strong curriculum that places great importance on learning how to learn, reason, question, and investigate.
This year I have designed my curriculum around the idea of "The American Dream." We have been studying the idea of "The Dream" and "The Reality" using integrated literature and history. For example, presently we are reading the play "Fences" by August Wilson and studying the Civil Rights Movement. The essential question that is guiding this unit is, "Does The American Dream mean different things to different Americans?" What would make this year complete would be a culminating project that asks students to read a Banned Book during Sustained Silent Reading (which is already an established part of our daily class routine) and lead a Socratic Seminar that connects the ideas in the Banned Book to the issues and themes we have been studying all year: freedom, tolerance, the journey, dreams, and justice.
Banned Books Week celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one's opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met. Banned Books Week stimulates awareness of our right to read the materials of our choice.
Unfortunately, our school does not have the funds and resources to create a library, and our classroom library is depleted and does not have many of the Banned Books that would make this project a success. To make this dream project into reality, my 2 Literature classes (50 students) would benefit from 2 copies of the following books:
"Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury...of course!
"The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison
"The Chocolate War" by Robert Cormier
"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain
"1984" by George Orwell
"Brave New World" Aldous Huxley
"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harpur Lee
"The Color Purple" by Alice Walker
"The Catcher in the Rye" by JD Salinger
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou
"Black Like me" by John Howard Griffin
"Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess
"Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keys
"Forever" by Judy Blume
"Go Tell it on the Mountain" by James Baldwin
"Black Boy" by Richard Wright
"Go Ask Alice" by Anonymous
"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey
Thank you so much for your support.
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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 Ms. Russo and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
