GoKawiilListen to this post
Key Takeaways High school English teacher Kristina Ulmer created the $20 Kindness Challenge to honor her younger sister, Katie Amodei, who died in a 2014 car crash.
Ulmer used about $100 of Amodei’s recovered tip money, added her own funds and turned it into $20 bills that each student had to use for an act of kindness.
The open‑ended assignment, to do something kind with $20 and report back, has become an ongoing classroom tradition impacting 425 students.
An English teacher in Pennsylvania has turned a deeply personal loss into a growing kindness movement, per ABC News.
High school English teacher Kristina Ulmer lost her younger sister, Katie Amodei, in a car crash in October 2014, just weeks before Amodei’s 30th birthday. Her late sister, who was training to be an EMT and waitressing on the side, had always been drawn to helping people who were struggling.
“She never could understand why we lived in a world where there was so many riches, yet people were lacking,” Ulmer told People earlier this week.
After the crash, police recovered Amodei’s purse from the overturned car. Inside was a wad of about $100 in tip money from her waitressing shift. Ulmer held onto it, knowing she wanted to use it in a way that reflected her sister’s lifelong concern for others.
Four years later, that money became the seed of an experiment in Ulmer’s classroom. While teaching Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” to her 9th-grade English class, inspiration struck: she could give her sister’s money to her class with the instruction to do something kind with it. She immediately added some of her own funds, went to the bank and exchanged the money for stacks of $20 bills — one for each student she taught.
The $20 assignment
... continue reading