School Responsibilities

A long time ago, I taught economics to high school seniors for a couple of years before becoming a school counselor. I tried to balance economic theory and practices such as how the stock market works, financial regulations and such with what I considered "practical economics" that would hopefully be useful to them in real life. One thing I did was I had pairs of students who would be given theoretical income amounts who would use that income to come up with household budgets and yearly family financial plans. They actually had to research how much power bills, average grocery budgets, car expenses, mortgages or rental fees and other things were likely to cost and figure out what they could afford . Most of them had no accurate idea of what most of those things cost when we started. Many of them were totally surprised at how expensive things were. We also went over what to expect at the bank with regard to checking accounts, saving accounts, and loans. At that time, Economics was only a Social Studies elective but I think it is a great idea to expose high school students to real world financial information as they are doing more frequently these days.