This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
My Students
I have been told that my classroom is doing the impossible. I am currently teaching in an extremely impoverished neighborhood where 100% of the students receive free lunch. Of my 200 students, more than half are of special needs, including many types of emotional and learning disabilities.
Our students are exceptional.
They require lots of love and support. They also require a challenging curriculum, which, unfortunately, has not been provided to them until my classroom. Many students are bored of school and completely turned off by the monotony of the process of traditional education. I am also very aware that my DC public school students have a plethora of issues at home and on the streets, that often distracts some students completely from work at school. It is a challenge as a teacher to overcome the insurmountable obstacles and challenges that distract our students. In order to do so, I must present lessons in creative and purposeful ways. Conducting real, publishable research has caught the attention of the majority of our students.
My Project
Research has been considered inconceivable in the DC urban school that I am currently in. As my experience has shown in the past, genuine exploratory science interests children and motivates them to learn more about the world around them. My move from CT to DC has opened my eyes. Urban schools, even in our Nation's capital, are in dire need of basic learning tools, especially when it comes to recording and analyzing data, conducting research and publishing findings. My students are in dire need of a digital SLR camera for documenting their research on corals and other organisms and a reliable computer for photo analysis, data input and Internet-based research. The computer we have in our classroom is far too outdated to handle basic multitasking of Internet research and publishing software, let alone demanding photo analysis software. Currently, several students have several thousand photos of thermally stressed corals that need analysis for a global warming research paper.
Students conducting real science is not something that happens often in my current urban public school.
Budgets are tight and resources are limited. My students are sitting on genuine, publishable data. The number of student who have the potential to conduct real science is limitless. Your donation will advance our students progress in STEM research. Please consider our future and how a small donation can change students' lives.
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
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. III and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
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