TIME for Kids — Education, Technological Access, and some rambles on social impact

Calvin Chu
Aug 28, 2017 · 3 min read

Elementary school wasn’t my best stretch of education; I routinely received a smattering of letter grades across the board (call it an assorted variety pack). However, reading was one thing I always enjoyed.

I was a voracious reader when I was younger— but as I grew older, more schoolwork meant less time for reading everything from exciting novels to sports magazines. I will, however, never forget one classroom activity.

One thing my well-funded elementary school always had was a subscription to TIME for Kids — they were maybe 4 pages (two leaflets) of material, but they were the Reader’s Digests of kids reading material. Sometimes I wish my own writing held the reader’s attention like those did for whole classrooms.

These were literally the best.

As I was cleaning up my room over the summer, I stumbled upon a few old ones (still in surprisingly good condition!), sighed for a few minutes as I reminisced of my past enjoyment in a previous analog age before SMARTBoards existed.

I’m even fond of the bad memories rooted inthese mini-magazines. I once ended up in the principal’s office because a friend and I vandalized the covers of our copies with some blue ink etched into the semi-gloss print.

Today, as I was doing my daily internet scouring, trying to learn more about different crowdfunding and impact-oriented outlets, I stumbled upon this campaign on DonorChoose — a teacher looking for a classroom’s worth of subscription to none other than TIME for Kids.

And immediately I was torn.

I’m not kidding — I actually got more excited remembering these magazines than I did when I read my first one!

The teacher said that due to a lack of technological access in the classroom, there weren’t many online resources that she could utilize for her students. Part of me immediately wanted to give to pay off the entire subscription, despite being a random college student that sweats over how much money I spend on public transit. But part of me also wanted to highlight that it’s 2017, and we can’t even get computers and internet into classrooms to take advantage of all the materials out there on the web. Can I run a used computer drive to get some machines into kids’ hands? How about we buy a couple Chromebooks (which by the way, are great!) for the classroom? Can I do something else to unlock the unlimited potential of learning that the internet provides? If we can’t even give our students the best opportunity to find something they love to learn about, what’s the real price of that?

This also brings up a problem that I’m still trying to understand and hopefully tackle one day with MycroChange — the psychology of giving. Why do I still hesitate to give even though the cause is worthy and I genuinely care about this specific problem and know the potential of impact? When will I (and everyone else) stop hiding behind the excuse of being a broke college student and start doing? If I can’t even convince myself to give, how can I expect others to?

I think it’s TIME for us Kids to start thinking more about how we can actively participate in the causes that resonate with us. Crowdfunding creates a mindset that we can all turn our financial change into sizable social change. As we realize the importance of things like education and technological access, we will hopefully correspondingly do more to give every kid the chance to learn.

Update: only $48 is left to go, as TIME magazine itself will match all donations, so if you feel compelled to help, it’s definitely within reach now! :) Or ya know, we could get TIME to donate a bunch more of these to more classrooms, or kids could share one per table instead of getting one for everyone, etc. They teach sharing in school still, right?

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