By Adriana Yarkin, Copy Editor
“Nothin’ like the Quotient Rule at 8:04 a.m. on a Tuesday.”
I chose this quote — stated quite enthusiastically by my calculus teacher Andy Callender — to be my senior quote because not only is it humorous and oddly specific, it’s also a more-than-decent summary of my high school experience.
The school’s curricula has been highly successful in preparing students for a great number of academic opportunities. The administration has done a genuinely impressive job of offering a wide range of programs, from Career and Technical Education (CTE) and art credits, to various math and English electives, to travel opportunities associated with language courses.
Across the student body, however, there is a significant lack of knowledge when it comes to personal finance skills.
Middle and elementary school students learn some basic consumer economic skills. Third- and fourth-year math students graduate knowing how to calculate interest, and social studies classes focus on finance when it relates to politics, tending to look at the importance of taxes, general trends in the flow of money and laws passed in relation to those trends. That said, credit cards remain obscure; personal budgeting hasn’t yet pushed its way into our reality, and student loans sit like a thundercloud on the horizon.
A number of students, mostly upperclassmen, have jobs and already deal with a bank account and some level of personal savings. Many of us spend hours filling out scholarship applications and developing an understanding of the process of paying for college to varying degrees. Mostly though, we just cross our fingers and hope for a lot of luck.
This approach can be dangerous, particularly in how the effects will manifest themselves for many of us — student debt. The school impresses upon us all of the tools that we need in order to play the game, yet forgets to tell us the rules.
As speculated by social studies teacher Heather Jurs, students are more likely to have a higher knowledge of personal finance if they have not taken AP courses — likely because in non-AP courses, teachers have greater freedom to go more in-depth on requested details. However, while AP classes must follow a very structured curriculum up until the AP tests in May, teachers are more or less able to decide what they would like to teach afterward.
Last spring in my AP U.S. History (APUSH) class, Jurs taught a several-day lesson centered around filling out tax forms. Over the course of the year, Jurs had noticed a lack of understanding among her students whenever she talked about anything relating to home economics. Her offer to give a brief set of lessons on the topic garnered a wave of enthusiasm.
“When I put that as an option at the end of the year, it was one of the top choices that people were interested in doing after the AP exam,” she said.
A tight sense of community emerged as the class bonded over the shared challenge of filling out various tax forms.
Though it was listed in the coursebook last spring, Consumer and Family Resources has not been offered at VHS for a number of years. According to Dr. Stephanie Spencer, who is the Director of Teaching and Learning for the district, a number of explanations present themselves as to why it was not offered as a course this year including lack of interest, scheduling conflicts, and difficulty in finding a teacher with the credentials and schedule flexibility necessary to teach it.
Though students have expressed an interest in learning personal finance skills, many likely do not have room in their schedule nor the desire to spend an entire semester on the topic.
It would therefore be logical for the school to make a small number of personal finance lessons available to students outside of class.
They could take form as an optional lecture by a teacher or guest speaker in the theater, or as an upperclassmen alternative to Character Strong, either of which could take place during SMART periods.
While a full course offering must follow a curriculum handed down by the state, a lesson or sequence of lessons taught during SMART would be under the jurisdiction of Principal Danny Rock as well as ASB.
The school does a commendable job in creating well-rounded, academically strong graduates ready to move on in the next step of their lives, yet this noticeable gap in our education is detrimental — and easily fixed.
