When the ambience triggers a certain action in us, we say, “It’s in the air.” End of a year on the English calendar (and the Diwali time on the Indian calendar) is one such time when the ambience triggers a sense of giving in you. We are not physically up in the northern hemisphere right now, but the feeling still engulfs us.
Giving is a big topic with many connotations. In this blog-post, we are not going to go into why we want to give and how much. I am not a well-known philanthropist, but I don’t want to curb my enthusiasm of giving and then writing about how we carried out a very small session of giving.
I scheduled the “It’s Giving Time” event on the school calendar and everyone accepted the invite. I chose that we keep it simple:
- Go to the beautiful and simple Amaya restaurant (located at the mouth of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune) for breakfast.
- List the charities that we are interested in donating money to. Each donor can pick as many charities as they want. Our budget this year is $150 per donor.
- While picking a charity, there is no need to look at how popular a charity is. Just look at how indispensable it has been for you.
We reflected upon the past year of homeschooling (and before) and came up with the following:
In the above image, D, A, R, and K stand for our name initials. So, you can see that we are a DARK family and homeschool!
Everyone knows of Wikipedia and Khan Academy. I personally love Archive.org. It really is a treasure trove of all media, especially books (the way-back machine is just awesome and the way-forward machine is awesome too). Do you know pTable? It is, along with the periodic table of videos (and Prof. Poliakoff), the best resource for studying the periodic table of elements! My favorite text editor on the computer is Vim and our hats are off to computer programmers like Bram Moolenaar and Tim Pope. 3b1b and Grant have been absolutely phenomenal. SJPL, the public library of San Jose, has been extremely generous to us over the years. The OpenStax initiative by the Rice university has been very useful especially for our high school student. Solving the Project Euler is just so much fun! The MOOC revolution was fueled by the MIT Open Course Ware and OCW had to be on the list as well.
Thanks to all these wonderful people! We have received much, much more from them than what we are giving this year.
Free Learner's School 