This is my first year teaching "financial math", and this semester we've focused on "financial literacy". Over the past couple days my students have learned the differences between stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, and today we talked about stock market indices (DJIA, S&P 500) and index funds. The previous couple weeks we spent talking about credit (including credit cards) and debt.
Financial Math is one of the most practical courses we teach at school. I'm not saying it should be a graduation requirement, but I'm trying to make the course into one that students want to sign up for rather than the low-level dumping ground it's been for students who need one more math course in order to graduate.
My principal recognizes how important such knowledge is, and a couple years ago he brought in a guest speaker to address the senior class about such things. This guy did not know how to talk to teenagers, did not know how to tailor his talk to his audience, did not know how to make his talk interesting. I'm an adult, and listening to this talk was difficult for me.
A couple days ago at lunch I was talking about what I'm teaching in class, and someone brought up that assembly from two years ago. One of our social science teachers said, "You and I should give that talk. We'd be so much better at it." And we would.
I'm thinking of proposing that to our principal. Two speakers, playing off one another, addressing such things as budgeting, credit, and debt. Sure, it would only be an hour or two, but I have no doubt we could make it engaging.
My guess is it would be more useful, and more interesting, than some of the other talks that are given to our seniors.
6 comments:
My high school required a one-semester "Econ" course, but it doesn't sound like it was a practical as what you are doing.
The only lesson I remember was about what the teacher called "utes". A ute is a measure of your pleasure and satisfaction from using or buying an item. In class, he used the example of a brownie. When you eat that first brownie, it is so good and it makes you very happy: on other words, you get lots of utes out of it. So you grab a second one, it is still good, but your utes have dropped, since you're now getting full and nothing satisfies like the first one. You grab a third brownie, and now your utes are way down. Grab a fourth, and you might be in negative ute territory and start wishing you had never begun, etc. The lesson was the the utes should balance with the price, and to this day, I still think of how many utes I will get if I am considering buying something I don't really need.
-- Ann in L.A.
Go for it! As a DivorceCare facilitator, I can vouch that you will be giving the kids tools that will help them throughout their lives. After lack of commitment (affairs and pornography) finances is a close 2nd for reasons given why people divorce.
As someone who was in your trigonometry class over 10 years ago now, I would have killed to take this class. I don't understand any of these things now.
Come over, I'll make some tea, and we can talk about it. (BTW, who *are* you?!)
Teens are facing big financial decisions. They need the tools to understand the tradeoffs. Everyone should know about "opportunity costs," for instance. Compound interest.
Definitely. Compound interest, paying yourself first, not getting into debt (even credit card debt). If they learned those three lessons, then the hour or so talk would be worthwhile.
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