Sunday, September 27, 2009

How to teach financial literacy in high school without changing the curriculum

A recurring theme during this recession is that they should teach financial literacy in high school. Of course, adding mandatory courses isn't that simple. There's only room for so many courses over the four years, there are all kinds of other courses that people want to be made mandatory, and there still has to be room for people to take electives like French and Physics and History all the way through to Grade 12.

So here's what we do: make every single word problem in the textbooks about a financial literacy concept, whenever mathematically possible.

For example, one thing I learned in one of my high school math classes was the formula for compound interest. M = P(1 + i)^n. I still use it to this day when trying to plan my personal finances. However, every word problem we had on this concept was about earning interest on investments. They could quite easily have made some of the word problems about credit card interest. Same mathematical concept, same word problem, but now you've taught how credit card interest works, which is one of the concepts people are complaining that they don't teach in high school.

Apparently calculus is used in economics similarly to how it's used in physics. I don't know enough about economics to know how this works. (And I find it SO WEIRD that so artificial a concept as economics would follow the mathematical laws of the physical universe.) But they could have taught this quite easily with a sentence or two about how calculus is used in economics, followed by some economics-based word problems. Then everyone who takes calculus will know a bit about economics. They did that with physics - I learned about derivatives and velocity and acceleration in Calculus class before I even took the relevant Physics class - so it shouldn't be any harder to do it with economics.

As an added bonus, it will make mathematics seem more relevant to students, because everyone knows you have to do money stuff when you're a grownup.

It will take some rewriting of textbooks, but that's more painless and possibly faster than rewriting the curriculum.

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