As school starts, teachers are scrambling to acquire the supplies they need, often paying their own money. Donors Choose lets teachers submit projects that need funding. Donors can pick an idea they want to fund.

For example, Mrs. N wants science kits and books for her low-income elementary students in South Carolina to use with their parents.

I need 3 commercial science kits, 1 magnet lab kit, and 3 sets of science concept books that can be taken apart and made into 20 individual take home science experiment kits for my students to check out, take home, conduct experiments, and report their finding to the class. This exploration will not only reinforce classroom instruction in magnetism, force and motion, simple machines, and matter, but the process will expand student learning through family participation.

$492 would fund the project.

Mr. S wants to buy comic books to motivate his Texas middle-school students, who are learning English.

My goal is to put quality comic books, that are easy to read, but require high academic skills and rigor, into the hands of my students. Research has shown that while easier to read than “regular novels,” comic books actually require higher order thinking skills to understand.

He needs $546.

The Bloggers’ Challenge starts Oct. 1. Look for more.

Nine-year-old Jericho Scott is a good baseball player — too good, it turns out,” reports the AP.

The right-hander has a fastball that tops out at about 40 mph. He throws so hard that the Youth Baseball League of New Haven told his coach that the boy could not pitch any more. When Jericho took the mound anyway last week, the opposing team forfeited the game, packed its gear and left, his coach said.

Jericho has never hit a batter. Apparently, he has excellent control too. But rival players can’t get a hit when he’s pitching.

Via Outside the Beltway.

Middle-school students are acting up less on the bus in Clarksville, Tennessee since “bus radio” was installed.

In just two weeks of school, (driver Jeff) Holt said he can see “a calming and soothing effect on the kids.”

. . . Not only are the students “bustin’ a move,” head-bopping and swaying to the tunes, but they stay in their seats, Holt said. If they get out of their seats, they lose the privilege of listening to the programming.

The music played is considered suitable for children.

We’re Teaching Books That Don’t Stack Up, writes Nancy Schnog, a private school English teacher, in the Washington Post. High school reading lists ignore teens’ tastes and maturity levels, she writes. Students decide that literature is a bore.

It’s hard to forget my son’s summer-reading assignment the year before he entered ninth grade: Julia Alvarez’s “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” Try as he did, he never got beyond the first of 15 vignettes about four culturally displaced sisters who search for identity through therapists and mental illness, men and sex, drugs and alcohol. I could hardly blame him. We ask 14-year-old boys to read novels about the travails of anguished women and want them to develop a love of reading?

Her male students beg for less emotions, more plot.

As the author of a book about a charter school, I was interested in The Lights of El Milagro, Kevin Riley’s inspirational book about turning around a K-8 charter school south of San Diego near the Mexican border.

Teachers about to retire had been working for a year at the year-round charter to boost their pensions, then leaving. Riley negotiated the right to hire and fire his own teachers. Only 18 percent of students were performing at grade level. He set a goal of getting 90 percent of students to proficiency. Grades two through five were reorganized by performance rather than age. A newcomers program was started for new arrivals from Mexico. Using data, teachers analyzed and refined the curriculum to fit students’ needs. Teachers and counselors evaluate each student’s academic and family issues to ensure that each one gets the help they need, including intensive support for children in crisis. A middle school was added, divided into boys-only and girls-only classes.

Mueller students — most from low-income and working-class Mexican-American families — now earn comparable scores to average California students. Ninety percent proficiency remains the goal.

More Than a Dream is G.R. Kearney’s account of the first Cristo Rey high school in Chicago, founded by Jesuits to give low-income minority students a first-class academic and social education.

Martine and Gregory Millman have come out with a well-blurbed book, Homeschooling: A Family’s Journey.

Did I mention, Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the School That Beat the Odds? Order your copy today and put a smile on a blogger’s face.