Children wait patiently for instruction in Blair Watler's Charlotte, North Carolina Teach for America classroom.
Blair Watler may be 1000 miles from Lake Highlands working with disadvantaged children in Charlotte’s Teach for America program, but she doesn’t hesitate to ask for help from friends back home. And LH doesn’t hesitate to lend a hand.
We’ve written about Blair before here on the blog. Over the summer, the LHHS grad collected books to build a classroom library for her kids. This time Blair has a new project. She’s collecting enough money through Donorschoose.org to purchase a class set of the novel, “Hunger Games.” Her project is called “Hungry for Literacy.” Just a few days after creating her page, the request for books was fully funded, mostly from LH friends or from former classmates at UT.
“One of my goals when I started teaching was not to just teach to a test, but to encourage my kids to fall in love with reading,” Blair said. “I truly believe the point of a formal education is to ignite that spark in a child that causes them to be curious and life-long learners, in and out of the classroom.”
“’The Hunger Games’ is addicting,” she gushed. “This is the ‘Harry Potter’ of this generation of students. Many of my kids have never felt that ‘reading flow,’ you know when you open up a good book and BOOM, next thing you know you’ve read 200 pages without even thinking about it. I want to show my kids that reading doesn’t have to be hard work, it can be fun.”
Congratulations, Blair, on making a difference in the lives of American children.
