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Reading Rainbow Kickstarter Earns One Million Dollars In Less Than a Day
An anonymous reader writes "LeVar Burton and the rest of the Reading Rainbow crew opened a Kickstarter campaign to bring back Reading Rainbow yesterday, with the ambitious goal of collecting a million dollars for their cause. They are now at almost two million dollars, with over a month left to go. 'This Kickstarter campaign is about reaching every web-connected child. Universal access. Thousands of more books than what we have now. And hundreds of more video field trips,' Burton said."
Well done.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As much as I loved Reading Rainbow growing up, I have two problems with this:
1. If you go to their website, nothing indicates this is a non-profit corporation.
2. None of the people involved has a background in education, child development, psychology, etc.
... for those of us who didn't grow up with it, what is it? I presume it has something to do with reading, and that it was around a while ago, but not TOO long ago (as the same people who were part of it are part of it again). Google helps, but this is the stuff that should be in TFS -- not just a link to the kickstarter.
IOW, there's not enough material in TFS to comment on the topic without first doing actual research. Is this a trick?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
1. If you go to their website, nothing indicates this is a non-profit corporation.
And so what??? Were you hoping for a tax break? The only question at hand is, will they do what they promise to do. If so, good enough.
2. None of the people involved has a background in education, child development, psychology, etc.
You know, the same was true when he was on Reading Rainbow the TV show. Do you think that show (a) helped kids of (b) destroyed lives.
In fact I would place his being on Reading Rainbow as having more of a background in education than most people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Reading Rainbow was a wonderful show on PBS that ran for a long long time, and LeVar Burton has been involved with it and with kids education for decades (even before playing his role in Star Trek TNG). Even though it has reached its goal, I'm throwing in a hundred or two myself. My opinion: Anything donated will be well spent, LeVar Burton is just that type of person, who you know you can depend on.
-Matt
it kind of makes me sad that DPF fusion energy hasn't even be able to reach half its measly $200,000 goal on indiegogo: https://www.indiegogo.com/proj...
Why are our priorities so back-asswards.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Republican much?
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
I wonder what implications being able to raise money for a common cause like this will have on the future of business. Will the top corporations of tomorrow be crowdfunded by people commonly wanting a particular good or service? What happens if you add virtual currency and 3D printers into the mix? Is this what Alan Watts was talking about when he referred to money as being an illusion? It's all in your head, man. Da future.
It was a kick-starter wet dream. When I saw the initial post I said "He'll have the money in 48 hours tops". Apparently I overestimated by about 4x!
But you don't have to take my word for it!
I don't have a background in education, child development, or psychology, yet I read to my son every night.
If you think the kickstarter appealed to motherhood and apple pie and to everything warm and cuddly, I'm not sure that you absorbed what it actually said.
The message was almost the exact opposite of welcoming. It presented the picture of an epic national calamity, a whole country losing its grip on a cornerstone of civilization, the ability to read, and delivering the nation's youngsters into a life of limited horizons and to third world status at a time when the rest of the world is in strong ascendency.
To call the message merely bleak is a colossal understatement. Far from appealing to cuteness, it appealed directly to severe guilt and intense worry among all those who understand that the last generation put the gears of civilization in reverse.
None of this is news of course. The kickstarter succeeded so well because this very high profile problem has been worrying millions of people for many years.
You are right though that LeVar Burton's role here was very important. People want effective leaders working strongly for society and LeVar fits the bill perfectly, unlike virtually everyone wearing an official badge in the institutionally corrupt system of politics. As a figurehead for his group of workers, he's an important ray of hope.
It's not just you. The Washington Post kind of had the same questions in a longer essay format.
Where in the world is the Carmen Sandiego kickstarter?
My Living Nightmare Of Encouraging Kids To Read Is Over
By LeVar Burton
Thank god.
After 26 long years, I can finally rest easy. Twenty-six years I spent standing in front of a camera, gritting my teeth, and shilling the latest works of every hack children's book author imaginable. For 26 years, I've told kids they could open a magical door to another world just by reading a book, when the only door it ever opened for me led to a soul-sucking career in the horrifying abyss of public television.
But now, at last, it is over. I don't have to lie anymore. I don't have to live that nightmare.
When the news came that Reading Rainbow would be canceled due to a lack of funding, I felt—well, to use a cliché like you'd find in one of the hundreds of books I pimped endlessly—like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Every day I went to work hoping that maybe the studio had burned down, that maybe the program had been cut, that maybe PBS would finally stop squeezing the life from me drop by drop. Now that it's over, I feel the relief a bruised and broken soldier must feel when he is rescued after rotting away for decades in some dank, forgotten POW camp.
May that godforsaken show burn in hell.
At long last, I can pick up a book and read for pleasure! Haven't read one in ages. You know what I was reading during those 26 insufferable years? Scripts. Scripts for roles that went to actors who weren't stigmatized by their association with a TV show occupying the time slot right after Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
I happen to be an accomplished actor. I starred in Roots, which was the most-watched show in American television history. My stirring portrayal of Kunta Kinte got me an Emmy nomination. But you know what? At 25 years old, when the opportunity to earn a regular paycheck working on a children's show came along, it seemed like a pretty damn good idea.
I was dead, dead wrong.
Little did I know the next quarter century of my life would be an unrelenting blur of excruciating trips to some of the most boring places on earth. Apiaries, steam trains, old mills—every week they sent me to a fresh hellhole, and every week I had to interview the dullest people imaginable.
And those humiliating books. Maebelle's Suitcase and The Jolly Postman. These were not the classics. Anyone who could glue paper between two pieces of cardboard and hire a publicist could get a book on that show. And there I was, in sheer agony, trying to keep a smile on my face while talking up Germs Make Me Sick!
Before long, people began recognizing me on the street, and inevitably they'd come over and start singing this awful, cloying tune. When I finally asked somebody what the hell it was, I was sickened to learn that it was the show's theme. I'd never heard it. They didn't play it on the set, and Lord knows I never saw one episode of that garbage when it aired.
Hoping to escape Reading Rainbow's clutches, I started taking any role I could get. I'm proud of some of them: I played Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Martin Luther King in Ali. But you know what the most challenging role of my career was? Hosting Reading Rainbow and acting like I gave a shit about getting kids interested in books.
Fact is, I couldn't care less whether kids learn to read. There, I said it.
Look, Reading Rainbow was a television program. That should tell you something right there. What I should have done is hosted a show that taught children how to watch more television. I bet they would have come up with the funding to renew that show.
All I've done for 26 years is drive to work, clock in, read my lines, clock out, go home, and cry myself to sleep. Now I'm much older, a broken man, but I've reached the end of my terrifying journey. And do you know what's at the end? Do you what's at the end of the "Reading Rainbow"? A giant crock of shit, that's what.
But you don't have to take my word for it.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/my-living-nightmare-of-encouraging-kids-to-read-is,11495/
The Onion, America's Finest News Source
Its a news site, it must be true!
... what The Onion is.
Are you seriously this ignorant??
> When we meet our initial goal of $1,000,000, we will launch a new version of Reading Rainbow on the single most-used digital platform: the web.
A million dollars for an "interactive" website? Clearly this man is a marketing genius.
Yep, even Reading Rainbow did an episode on ST:TNG:
Two/2 Parts:
1 (9:12): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
2 (6:34): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Even then, it reads more like he hated that particular job for production based reasons, which I kinda wouldn't blame him for. Shit a 5 year old is thrilled about tends to bore the fuck out of adults, but he has to pretend to care on camera, likely for multiple takes.
I like kids, I like the idea of encouraging kids to read, and educate themselves, but fuck if I wouldn't want to shoot somebody if I had to pretend I was thrilled about some trivial nonsense seven times in a row because the take wasn't quite right.
And then do it again the next day.
This is why people like Fred Rogers impress the hell out of me. For all I'm in favor of these ideas and goals, I know I'd go freaking batty trying to fill a role like that. These people care enough to do it anyway.
"Thousands of more books than what we have now."
Did he actually say that? Or did the fool who transcripted it not know how to write English properly?
...as a french reader, I'd appreciate to know what Reading Rainbow is about. First time ever that I read this name... I imagine a very expensive astrological device....
#17 on the "most funded" kickstarter list of all time. :)
Good job
The name is a problem nowadays. People associate "rainbow" with "gays"
I'm not sure this will really meet the ambitions of the previous series. If we want to get all kids to read more, we really need the medium that reaches the most children. The web is great and all, but public television is available to far more people for far less money. Kids that are in the most critical target audience for this likely won't have their own devices to watch this online and will have to convince their parents to let them watch it instead of letting Daddy continue with his half-life 7 marathon or mommy with her endless facebook chatter.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'm a fan of The Onion, too!
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
I wonder how much advantage of the medium a PC version of a TV series will be able to take... I''ve been homeschooling my kids whilst we've been travelling so I've tried a number of these online reading tools. Some are just a mess of unindexed content, or just libraries to wonder in and pick out books to read or subject videos to watch. The best for my 5 yr old has been ReadingEggs which has heaps of interactive mini games joined together into an overall programme that the child can follow through themselves going right from pre-literate to reading age 7 or so.
Has anyone used the iPad app of this Reading Rainbow program? What's it like ? And how much teacher support is needed?
I worked on that show. I personally know the producers. The problem with making that show a "kickstarter" is rights issues. Because the TV show is based on a computer-game, the TV show can't do anything without going through the rights holders (broderbund?), and that makes everything take longer.
The show was also a co-production between two powerful PBS stations, one in Boston and one in Pittsburgh, if I recall, and they could never agree on anything -- that's how the show came to be shot in New York, because it was in-between those two cities, so neither group could completely take control.
As for my contribution to the series, I designed the middle-game board, where stuff flipped over to reveal clues. I also developed a close friendship to "the chief" and was devastated when Lynn passed away suddenly.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Neither the headline or OP bothers to give the slightest hint to what "Reading Rainbow" is/was. I therefore find myself underwhelmed as to the significance.
I'm also struck by the incongruity of "every web-connected child" and "Universal access". Particularly when I suspect both are also missing the key word "American".
That America does not have funding for education and that there are schools in need. It is tremendously sad that 1 in 4 children in the USA grow up illitertate (as per the Kickstarter website). I wish the USA public infrastructure had funding to serve and educate their citizenry. Too bad they have to rely on private donors for this sort of thing. I guess the USA is really a poor country.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
I take your point with regard to universal access, but is it really going to be easier to convince mommy to give up her soap opera or Judge [celebrity] to let little Timmy watch Reading Rainbow?
I'm not sure this will really meet the ambitions of the previous series. If we want to get all kids to read more, we really need the medium that reaches the most children. The web is great and all, but public television is available to far more people for far less money. Kids that are in the most critical target audience for this likely won't have their own devices to watch this online and will have to convince their parents to let them watch it instead of letting Daddy continue with his half-life 7 marathon or mommy with her endless facebook chatter.
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