Financial Education

As I listened to Craig Cohen on WITF's Smart Talk last night, I had the eeriest feeling that I was invisible. For the last 20 years, I've taught Personal Finance to high school students in Family and Consumer Sciences classes. I'm not alone. Throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, there are hundreds of us , teaching children how to make wise consumer decisions. Students in my classes learn how to:

• finance a home


• comparison shop for cars and insurance


• save for long-term goals


• balance a budget


• create action plans with SMART objectives


• use credit wisely


• solve consumer problems

Last month two out of the three teachers in my department were furloughed. In West Shore School District, NINE Family and Consumer Sciences teachers were furloughed. In most districts, Family and Consumer Sciences is an elective course at the high school level. We need to reach ALL students. Yesterday's guests on Smart Talk were correct. Let's focus on teaching high school students how to be good money managers, not just as a lesson here and there in other classes, but in a stand-alone, required course taught by Family and Consumer Science professionals. Hold us accountable...we've eager for an opportunity to make a difference. Students need to learn practical, relevant knowledge and skills.

Designing a Home

For most families, housing is the area of need that requires the greatest expenditure of money over the lifespan. In the Family and Consumer Sciences classroom, students create a book that explains the process of making wise decisions about housing. First, they analyze the needs of a family, including how their values, the type of family and the stage of the family life cycle, affect their choices. They’ll write the text, upload it into the Moodle as a rough draft, then I’ll edit it and they’ll revise. In the second section, they use on-line resources (Google Earth, City Report, Zillow and Great Schools) to critique a particular location. Following the same editing procedure, they save the final draft. The third section of text explains the mortgage process, including cost of the house (realtor.com) down-payment, current interest rate, type of mortgage, monthly payment, and total expenditure over the life of the loan. They'll use the loan calculator in the Moodle for the financial calculations. The next step is to use an on-line floor plan design tool to lay out the floor plan. We’ve used furniture stores free, on-line tools in the past, but right now I’m investigating other options, such as Floorplanner. Has anyone used free, on-line floor plan software that you would recommend? To illustrate the aesthetics of the spaces, the students use Colourlovers and Color Scheme Generators. All of these sections are added to Mixbook, or another on-line publisher. They'll add photos from their own collection or search using Creative Commons, attribution and share-alike license or Google Images advanced search for images licensed for reuse. The students are totally engaged in the project, and the final products are amazing demonstrations of critical thinking and evaluation!

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Is School Killing Creativity?

John Bryant at the Governor's Institute for Financial Education

Operation Hope is a most appropriate name for an initiative that helps disenfranchised people make investments in their own futures. Tonight, John Bryant, an entrepreneur from Los Angeles, California, spoke to a hundred Pennsylvanian teachers, who are spending a week at Elizabethtown College being inundated by dozens of top quality financial education programs that are designed to prod students into success. The teachers were enthralled with his message urging them to be foot soldiers in the fight to restore financial well-being in the midst of the global "reset" of the economy. He said that Americans must have the courage to work hard. He spoke about the economic downturn being a global crisis. The speech was inspirational, superbly crafted to appeal to teachers' desire to be part of the solution, not the problem. The timing was perfect; our action plans are due tomorrow. I'm just wondering... Where was the word "ENERGY"??????? Why was the word "ENVIRONMENT" mentioned only once???? Aren't energy, environment and economy all words that must always be used together? Have those other two topics faded so quickly, just because we are no longer paying higher prices at the pump? Are we really all about the "language of money?" Is a less materialistic life at all possible for us?