“I wrote 63 songs this year. They’re all about Jeter.” Just kidding. The game we love, the players we hate, and more.
From Norman Mailer to Wendy Pepper — everything on film, TV, books, music, and snacks (shut up, raisins), plus the Girls’ Bike Club.
Helping public schools, winning prizes, sending a crazy lady in a tomato costume out in public.
Monologues, travelogues, fiction, and fart humor. And hens. Don’t forget the hens.
The Tomato Nation advice column addresses your questions on etiquette, grammar, romance, and pet misbehavior. Ask The Readers about books or fashion today!
$314,158. 1,120 donors. 51,507 students reached.
And it’s my mom’s birthday! Aw. Put your feet up, Nation; we’re done here. (Until the giving cards arrive.)
I’ve (re-)discovered a few things over the course of the recent Days Of Rage. Some of them are great!
I found it while researching a murder (…this is a sentence I have more frequent use for than most), the true story of a neighborhood legend from my childhood. I grew up in a leafy, …
Happy Birthday, Mrs. B!
The love letter to the TN readership is coming out soon, but for the moment, I’ve just updated the spreadsheet – and remain deeply in awe of you all. I hope each and every one of you had the Halloween you deserve.
Happy Birthday to the lovely Mrs. Bunting! I know she must be super proud of you! What a nice birthday present!
Once again BIG props to all of the Tomato Nation. I can’t believe how much we have helped. I love you guys!!!
Your donors gave an average of $280.
I couldn’t donate this year, for the first time since you’ve started this contest. Unemployment stinks. But watching this happen always makes me feel so warm and fuzzy, like people–most people–really are good.
Thank you for renewing my faith in humanity and the Internet for another year. And congratulations. This is–there’s no word for this but “amazing.”
Happy Birthday, Ma Bunting! Look what your daughter did. AGAIN. And your son, and grandson.
Scrolling through all the completed projects, the scope of what’s been accomplished here is finally hitting me. Teachers and children with whom we’ll never cross paths, who we’d never even know existed, have been touched by our actions. 51,507 students. A stadium full of students, and a baseball field full of teachers.
As Linda said in an earlier comment thread, it’s not just the money – don’t get me wrong, that’s a shit-ton of cash in a short time period. It’s the caring, the outreach, the showing that we care, that we’re listening, that we know the status quo is NOT OK, and that we’re fighting with them to change it. That we believe in education as the foundation of these kids’ lives and futures, that we believe in THEM and want to give them the tools to achieve.
That, my friends, is huge. It’s almost too much to comprehend, if you’re trying not cry. But I’m not, so I let it sink in. This is a bona fide Big Deal, and I am, as ever, proud to have been a part of it.
Can’t wait to get my giving card, so we can finish up the rest of the projects!
This is my first year participating in TNDC and I just want to say thank you. It’s an honor to be even a tiny part of so much awesome.
Ok, with a final total, I could do the math on the size of the HP cards — it comes out to about 41 cents on the dollar for each TN-Bet Red donor, since the original explanation said that the money will be divided proportionately among all the people who made a donation over the entire month.
Ooops. I forgot to take out the HP donation funds first — it’s about 78 cents on the dollar.
@Maria – “A stadium full of students.” Thanks. That really put it in perspective. Wow.
Dear Ms. Bunting,
Happy birthday. I confess I don’t know much about you, but I do know that you have raised two wonderful children, and I know they must have learned their selflessness and desire to help others from you. You have every reason to be proud of them, and of yourself.
Thank you.
Love,
Elizabeth
Happy Birthday, Mrs. B! You must be so very proud of your daughter-who rocks mightily.
And Happy Mrs. B’s birthday to the TN community, who also rock mightily. This is what “giving back” looks like. $314,158.
It’s All Saints’ Day. Just sayin’.
Hi there. I’m a lecturer at a state university in South Carolina and long-ago Tomato Nation reader. Every two weeks since the fall semester began, I’ve given to a different high-poverty South Carolina classroom’s DonorsChoose project to celebrate payday/still having a job. (OK, first I click around and get weepy about how awesome these teachers and kids are, then I give.) I was shocked to learn a project I just donated to, “Not Too Hard, Not Too Easy, But Just Right Books For Me,” was already fully funded. Then I clicked through.
An enormous thank you to TN donors Chris; Kerry from Columbia, SC; Miriam from Washington, DC; Sara from Cambridge, MA; Jessica from Reno, NV; Anneliese from Ohio; Jordan from New Haven, CT; Carlen; Pamela from Winnipeg, NY; and Jed from Dallas, TX. You all are amazing! If my transplanted yankee self never makes it back north, I look forward to teaching some of the third- through fifth-grader readers you helped in eight or so years.
I can’t think of a better gift for your mom than knowing her kids are capable of rallying so much awesomeness, and of rocking so much awesomeness themselves.
@cinetrix: My pleasure. I don’t do nearly as much reading as I ought to, but I love it, and if even one kid finds the same joy, then that’s a beautiful thing.
(*snif*!)
Happy Birthday, Mrs. B.!
Happy birthday, Mrs. B! Those are some great kids you’ve got there. (And the cutest little grandson, too!)
Nation, you never fail to amaze me. Can’t wait for next year!
Awesome is an overused word. But it’s fitting. Awe inspiring. Inspiring period. $270 per donor? DAYUM. I’m privileged to be part of the crew.
Congratulations, Nation! This is so freaking awesome and I am so proud to have been a part of this for 3 years now.
Sars, thank you so much for organizing this every year. Thank you to Amanda and Asirda and the Mysterians and MBT and all of you. This has been an amazing month.
What is even more amazing is imagining how much higher our “Students Reached” number is going to get once all the HP money is actually applied to projects! I wouldn’t be surprised if we exceed 75,000 students reached!
I didn’t realize how addicted I’d become to checking the totals every few hours!
@Liz C: I know! Not only did it make me feel better about the state of humanity, it was also a very worthy homework-break.
As a teacher in an under-funded Brooklyn school, Donor’s Choose has done a lot for my classroom and others in my school. Thank you for your support to the teaching community.
Ditto on that happy birthday! And again: wow.
Another touching thank you. The “unbelievable generosity” was for a $500 project that was matched, so the final cost to us was around $5 per kid.
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I can’t begin to thank you enough for your generosity. This has been a tough year for our program. With funding down and interest up we were worried we wouldn’t have materials for projects to do with the kids. This was magnified during our first meeting last week when almost 30 new students showed up wanting to join the program! Keep in mind this is an inner-city school where it is not considered cool to stay after school, let alone for engineering! But they filled every seat in the room for 2 hours after school. You have given us hope. We never thought we’d have access to this kind of material. Our program can look forward to taking on a whole new module now, which is integral to the engineering design process: modeling and prototyping.
Your kindness is doing more than just giving students materials for learning. It is showing kids the importance of giving back, that there are those who believe in what they are doing and who support their dreams. Thank you again for your unbelievable generosity. It is making a difference in the lives of some truly wonderful kids.
What I love is that Donor’s Choose has left up the whole Social Media Challenge set of pages, and that at 12:30 am Eastern Time on November 3rd, Tomato Nation Bet Red is showing its most recent donation as “6 hours ago” while all the others are at least “2 days ago”. We just don’t know how to stop, do we?
Yes, and I donated to a teacher today and it gave me a check box on the payment page that said something like “this donation was inspired by the tomatonation giving page” by checking gives dollar total to this giving page! Well, of course. So I guess we can keep adding to the total
My HP giving card arrived in my inbox today! I’m having a pretty crappy week, let me tell you, but I’m feeling so much better now that I’ve picked out a bunch of projects to fund.
Thank you to HP and to Sars, the very happy Intern and the rest of the tomato nation community for being so inspiring. Not even to mention the students and teachers. Time to find some projects to fund.
And at last, the love letter! You can read it here.
I’m only five months late!