My students need 37 4-packs of rechargeable batteries for our graphing calculators. We have TI-Navigator systems and Vernier probes with which to engage my students in learning, but we have no money to replace batteries as they die.
AAAGGGHHH! Anyone have extra batteries?
I teach Algebra 2 Pre-AP/IB Prep and Precalculus to students in grade 10 through 12. Our school is 92% free and reduced lunch, 50% Limited English Proficiency, and 95% minority. We are currently in the restructuring phase of NCLB and are remaking ourselves into a magnet school focusing on the Bio-sciences.
Have you ever been in the middle of doing some task with a battery operated instrument and had the batteries go dead? This happens more often than not to my students. They have just used a temperature probe to collect data on the cooling of a liquid, have transferred the data into a graphing calculator, and are about to find the equation that best describes the temperature change, when...WHAM! The screen goes blank. The batteries are dead in the calculator, the data is gone, and the search for batteries is on.
My students need rechargeable batteries to power their calculators and save a tiny portion of the earth.
We use our calculators not just to collect and analyze data, but also to take quizzes and turn in homework on, using the TI-Navigator system. This takes batteries.
We all know that school budgets are shrinking. There is often no money available for things like batteries. I have 30 calculators, that use 4 batteries each, and normally go through at least 2 sets of batteries a year per calculator. Doing the math, that's 240 batteries (at least). Not only is that a lot of money that ends up coming out of my pocket (it would buy more pencils and notebooks than my students could use all year combined), but it's also a lot of batteries going in a landfill, or having to find their way to a recycling center.
Rechargeable batteries would give my students the assurance that, while their data may be gone, they won't have to go on the battery hunt, giving them more time in class to redo the experiment. I have a battery charger already, so if we had more rechargeable batteries, there would be a ready supply of "ready-to-go" batteries waiting to be used, and less batteries needing to either be
Your help will not only benefit my students but also the environment. What could be better? These students and their children will inherit the earth after we are gone. With your help, they will have a good math education, learning with technology, exploring the worlds of math and the health sciences, AND have a better world to live in.
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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. Molkenbur and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.