The Gods must be crazy

This is my first blog, and I'm going to start with why I decided to create Classroom2Classroom. This project began about 8 months ago. My neighbor was getting ready to relocate to Wisconsin and he was going to have a garage sale. So, if we had anything, "feel free to put it out".

Not one to pass up a chance to clear out the garage, we gladly joined in. At the last minute, my wife handed me three bags of children's reading books. 

I need to explain, my wife has been a teacher for twelve plus years. She has taught various grade levels in a number of different school districts. She instructed me to put them on a table and mark them 25 cents each. 

Being a loving spouse, I did as I was told but with a great deal of angst. The books were in great condition; they could easily see a long life in a another classroom, and I know we paid more than a quarter for each. To add insult to injury, anything we made from the sales of these books, I knew, would be plowed back into her classroom.

As teachers, and their spouses know, any opportunity to generate a few pennies quickly gets reinvested into the classroom. That's just the way it is. 

After having randomly spread the book out on the table, my wife proceeded to fix the error in my ways. You see, "these books are for second graders, those are for third graders" and then we can combine them as this is a series and those are related to Presidents... and so it went. She busted out a boatload of "hidden knowledge" that only other teachers would truly know and appreciate. 

At the end of the day, I still had the three bags of books. We were then faced with the other two options teachers face with the books they purchase for their classroom libraries when they change grades: 2. donate them to a local charity, 3. pitch'em.

Neither of those options seemed attractive because we knew these books could be used in a classroom. Unfortunately, we didn't know where the need is and, of course, those teachers didn't know where the resources are located. 

And so, the seed was set for Classroom2Classroom. It would be a marketplace for teachers to buy and sell bundles of books and share their professional knowledge and experience with others about those books and bundles. 

So what does this have to do with the Gods being crazy? If you look at the current method by which teachers go about building classroom libraries, that experts recommend should have 600-1000 titles. You could only conclude that the Gods are nuts- go to garage sales, buy them one-at-a-time on-line, hope that someone nearby has a collection that they no long need. All of these approaches seem as random, time consuming, and as disorganized as bottle falling from the sky.