My mother was a schoolteacher for forty-seven years. Teaching is in my blood. When I think about education and how I can help, it comes down to two questions—What’s in it for the kids? What’s in it for the teachers?
Sue and I don’t contribute to building funds at schools. We don’t want our names plastered on gardens, gates, or library facades. We help get kids reading. We help teachers survive. We help bookstores.
It varies with the year, but we’ve given as many as 450 college scholarships for kids studying to be teachers. We fund classroom libraries all over the country. How come classroom libraries? Maybe because my mother paid for the books in her classroom and our family couldn’t afford it. So I’m painfully aware of the practice, and a whole lot of teachers continue it today.
When we put out the word through our partner Scholastic, over 82,000 teachers asked for help. Wow! In a sad way. That gave us some idea of the need. Recently, we helped 18,000 teachers pay for the books in their classroom libraries.
For years now, Sue and I have given holiday bonuses to folks who work at bookstores. Most people don’t understand how little money many bookstore employees make and how incredibly hard they work. We get letters from nearly every holiday-bonus recipient. They’re so thankful it’s almost embarrassing. The letters say things like “Thank you so much for the bonus. It allowed me to go to the dentist this year.” That’s a real quote, and it’s pretty typical.
So is this one: “This year we’re going to buy Christmas presents for my parents for the first time in five years.”
God bless the bookstore people.
Okay, and ow, my arm really hurts from all those back pats I just gave myself and Sue.
Here’s what I hope, though—that you’ll give yourself a whole lot of good reasons to pat yourself repeatedly on the back. We need to start rowing together in this big boat of a country. If we don’t row together, the boat goes nowhere, or, worse, it just spins around in circles.