Dear Friends,
As most of you know, I’m an English professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. I am deeply passionate about the power of education to help people live better, happier lives and to be more informed citizens. To this end, I’ve made it a special mission of mine to reach out to students in some of Chattanooga’s most underperforming schools to offer enrichment courses and to help them envision a future that includes the possibility of college and careers in the arts and sciences.
This summer, what that looks like is a week long STEAM experience camp in which we’ll visit the aquarium to consider how creatures that live in other environments develop, build model rockets with special tracking capabilities to learn a little bit about the mechanics of space flight, create dioramas to imagine what life in a Martian colony might look like when we finally make it to the red planet, and hopefully visit the Air and Space Museum in Huntsville, AL.
That last is where you come in. I’ve managed to secure funding for most of the trip, and all the other elements of the week-long camp, but I have a small funding fap that I need to fill in order to make the visit to the Air and Space Museum a reality. To help do that, I’ve set up a Facebook fundraiser, and you can contribute here:
https://www.facebook.com/donate/366020182152669/366024842152203/
I’m doing this through Facebook for ease of use, and because it’s the best way I have to engage with the community that this particular project will serve. (It’s possible, through Facebook, for me to share this with the families of potential participants, not so much to raise money as to demonstrate that there is community support and hopefully generate some excitement for the program!) I’m aware of all the ways in which the platform is problematic, but what platform isn’t?
I hope you’ll all forgive me for deviating pretty significantly from the purpose of this newsletter in this post, but this project is near and dear to my heart, and I think this last day trip is the thing that will make this a life long memory for the students who participate. Thank you.
Sarah
Thank you to everyone in this and my Facebook community. The event is fully funded after just 24 hours. I'm very grateful!