Thus Spake Zuska

It's October, and that means it's DonorsChoose time again! ScienceBlogs bloggers are, once again, participating in the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge. Basically, we ask you, our readers, to help public school teachers across the U.S. fund proposals for classroom supplies, activities, and field trips.

It's a shame we have to ask at all, but our nation's public school teachers are woefully underfunded and often spend their own personal money to purchase needed classroom supplies. Looking over proposals to build my challenge, it was heartbreaking to see that for some teachers, the lack of supplies as basic and pencils and paper impedes their ability to teach science and math.

So here we are. More details below.

Janet at Adventures in Ethics and Science, who organizes this whole effort each year, notes:

You may have noticed that Wall Street is in the throes of a financial crisis these days. What somehow escapes the notice of folks with the power to direct billions of dollars one direction or another is that public school teachers have been scraping for resources since long before Wall Street's financial crisis started. Theirs is a less dramatic crisis, but it's here and it's real and we can't afford to wait around for lawmakers on the federal or state level to fix it.

Janet also lays out how it works, and I've borrowed her text here, slightly modified:

Follow this link to my DonorsChoose website.

Pick a project from the slate I've selected (or more than one project, if you just can't choose).

Donate.

(If you're the loyal reader of multiple participating blogs and you don't want to play favorites, you can, of course, donate to multiple challenges! You can find a list of the other blog challenges here.)

DonorsChoose will send you a confirmation email. Hold onto it; our benevolent overlords at Seed will be randomly selecting some donors to receive nifty prizes. Details about the prizes and how to get entered will be posted here soon!

Sit back and watch the challenges inch towards their goals, and check the ScienceBlogs leaderboard to see how many students will be impacted by your generosity. And, if you like, you can track our collective progress on the motherboard, which will let you see just how badly ScienceBlogs bloggers are kicking the butts of tech bloggers, mommy bloggers, knitting bloggers, and the like.

You may notice the widget on my left sidebar that keeps track of my challenge; it's also a link to the challenge. I've started out with a small slate of projects; some of them have already been partially funded. I'll be adding more as projects get funded and as we move along through the month. I hope you'll find at least one project that catches your heart and inspires you to donate.

Even a $10 gift can make a difference because your gift will be combined with that of so many others. Last year Thus Spake Zuska's readers contributed over $2000 to Donors Choose! I hope we can do at least that well again this year. Thanks for your support, and I'm sure the teachers and their kids will thank you even more.