A conversation about schools, educators and tests. Education should be a priority, and we need to talk about it!
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lily eskelsen
How I Spent My Summer Vacation…
I went to Honduras this summer with fifteen new best friends. Some time ago, NEA was contacted by the . I laughed when I heard their name. I thought it sounded like the cow.
It is the cow.
Heifer’s been around since the Depression Era (the last one, not this one.) Their founder was in charge of a project to feed the hungry in post-war Europe. While distributing powdered milk to starving children, it occurred to him that after his church group completed its mission to feed the hungry, they would have left behind absolutely nothing that could sustain these communities.
He thought, “Instead of a cup of milk, we should have given them a cow.”
And Heifer was born. For decades they have developed projects in the poorest communities in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia… wherever there is poverty and hungry people. They do good work. But a lot of people do good work in poverty, health and social justice.
NEA and our members care about all those things, but I wondered what Heifer could possibly mean to our work here in the states when we are facing a crisis of confidence in our public schools, what it means to teach and what it means to learn, the fiscal meltdown of school budgets, teachers and support staff being laid off and jeopardizing the very futures of our students – especially those in communities most challenged by poverty, unemployment and crime.
It’s the Right Time to Do the Right Thing
I remember rolling my shopping cart through the grocery store with my son in tow. I was throwing in paper doilies from the bakery department. I had already thrown in a dozen glue sticks. 10 tubes of glitter. And 36 shot glasses.
No, I don’t have a drinking problem. That I know of. But they were on sale for 50 cents and I needed 36 because I had 36 5th graders that year and they were all going to come together (in my imagination) as these very sweet Mother’s Day gifts (the glasses were for mom to put rings and earrings, etc.), and we were going to write beautiful Mom’s Day poems, and I was really, really excited that the shot glasses were on sale, because the whole 36 Mother’s Day presents would only set me personally back about $40 bucks which was a whole lot less than the Mother’s Day presents we made last year.
(Watch Lily on ABC News with Diane Sawyer)
Now, the science projects were always a little more expensive. And I wanted my kids to have the poster board for the displays, but I figured they could still have plenty of writing space if we cut the poster board in half, and that would save me half the cost.
The classroom set of Old Yeller paperbacks was my most ambitious project. I rummaged though every thrift shop and yard sale, and actually came up with 18 copies, most around a quarter and most with almost every page still attached.