I took remedial math continuously from about 4th grade forward. There was never any threat of algebra becoming part of my education.
My participation in formal education pretty much stopped at about seventh grade, outside of English, where I excelled effortlessly. Eventually I took something called the proficiency examination, the first year it was made available in Los Angeles. It was a substitute for a GED, it tested your ability to function as a human in the world you were about to enter. To the shock of everyone in my life except me I did not pass it the first time because it was extremely heavy in math. After spending intensive tutoring time with my best friend I took it again and passed.
Three years later I decided to go to Los Angeles city College. There I studied philosophy, sociology, all the broadcasting related courses and a few other things I don’t recall. What I do recall is being on the Dean’s list every semester I attended which was six altogether because I was bouncing around, maintaining a 4.0.
A few years after that I found myself working for an entertainment business manager where I mastered the computer which was completely alien to everybody at the time (it was the mid 80s) and when I got bored with that was transferred into the bookkeeping department and perfectly did the books for about a dozen clients, paying their bills and maintaining their financials pretty easily.
In the years following that I discovered with my Mac I actually had a knack for low level scripting and data manipulation, I had fun messing around with spreadsheets even though a lot of it was frustrating and I couldn’t make the most of it.
But I did all that without ever getting within a mile of algebra and pretty much failing every math concept that was more complicated than multiplication and division. ( I’ve always been fascinated by the struggle I had understanding debits and credits as they apply to a P&L. After much debate and struggle, one of my coworkers finally figured out that we needed to drop the words debit and credit and replace them with something neutral, like apples and oranges. Once we did that I got the concept perfectly. But English and math were doing battle in my brain before we figured that out… )
From what I have been able to gather on my own and through my own experiences, I probably would’ve been pretty good at algebra. My issue was with numbers specifically and my related sort of math phobia. Once I got into computers I realized how much I loved the logic involved in formulas and scripting and what not. It appeal to me enormously and I loved figuring things out and the more I learned the more I bumped into algebraic concepts and realized -hey wait a minute, I probably would’ve rocked algebra because I rock this shit! Give me X and Y and I’m good -just keep the numbers out of it!
Thank you!! I hear the demand frequently to teach kids financial literacy, but teaching that to someone 14-17 is pointless. As a high school student, teaching me about 401k plans, IRA accounts, mortgages and other such things would have been the same as teaching me about the ancient Greeks, things which are completely irrelevant to my teen life.
How about some simpler concepts, like how to set a budget for one’s self based on a part-time job income, or how to compare and contrast credit card offers so one does not get ripped-off, or the dangers of payday loans versus the advantages of thinking about one’s long-term finances, how to avoid short-term dopamine hits that may wipe out one’s savings (like buying a POS car)? It does not have to involve 401K plans and IRAs and dividends and such, just the basics like compounded interest. I could see a lot of kids benefitting from some basic, straight finance (and law) topics without getting into the complexities.
Pretty much everyone is buying the curriculum in a box. I’ve been left alone because I wasn’t going to teach complex topics like traditional vs Roth IRAs or annuities (I could but I’m an outlier). Rather, for investments it was simple vs compounded interest (bank accounts and bonds) and stocks. With loans it was calculating total interest in paying off credit cards and amortized loans using time, down payments and extra principal payments as variables. Insurance was more about probability and for payroll taxes, that is really straightforward except for teaching them how to read a tax table. I added on the difference between a deduction and a credit but I think that was a bit above and beyond.
I guess my point is that you don’t need to be a certified financial planner to teach basic financial concepts. For parts of the curriculum you are not an expert in, well how do you handle it when you have to teach the unit on Islam and you have very little knowledge of it? In 2023 there is a lot of info out there to help. And I would argue high school seniors need to learn this before they move into the real world. I was inspired to develop the payroll tax unit (students calculate their net pay) because so many of my students got their first job and had no clue how paychecks worked. They’d come up to me and say they worked 20 hours at $15/hr so why didn’t they get $300 in their paycheck.
As for dalej42, that’s about the filter of what you teach. I wouldn’t teach the students the difference between retirement plans but I would show them that earlier is better so hopefully they start saving with their first paycheck. I show them the impact of down payments and term of the loan on car payments and overall cost because they need to be informed consumers because many buy cars. For taxes, I keep it simple and teach them about paychecks that many are already getting and don’t understand.
If you are learning what finance students in colleges are getting while in high school, I agree with you but I firmly believe they need a basic knowledge in place on their 18th birthday.
I’m sure all Algebra I classes teach the compound interest formula. Perhaps it would be good to have some real world examples in the word problems. ‘Is a $10,000 credit card loan at 29% better or worse than a $500,000 fixed rate 30 year mortgage at 6%?’
Exactly. I should have added to my list: how to evaluate how much college loan financing you should take on versus how your expected field of study may pan-out, pay-wise over the next decade. Kids have amassed a huge amount of debt with college and this can stifle their lives - a good study of this in HS is exactly the right time to talk about it.
Those are not compound interest problems. In my class, the credit card problem would be run through a spreadsheet comparing making minimum payments with higher payments. There is no easy formula for that. The mortgage is an amortization (and I tell my students you can amortize your credit card payment yourself). They use the (not compounded interest) formula to find their monthly payment then
Total Payments = Monthly Payment x (12 x t)
Total Interest = Total Payments - principal
And then we play with changing the down, the term and making extra principal payments (requires a spreadsheet)
I’m not going to go quite so far as to say it’s completely pointless - but I will say the 14-17 year old who gets anything out of such a class doesn’t really need the class. They will learn it even without a high school class , either from their parents or by educating themselves in one way or another.
I worked for a local municipality and when I got hired , I had a choice. I could contribute 3% of my pay to a pension and pay Social Security taxes or I could skip both pension and SS contributions. I chose to contribute - and I opened a deferred compensation account. Taking a financial literacy class in high school wouldn’t have mattered, Most of the people hired with me opted not to pay into either the pension or SS until they were forced to * . Some of them thought they would leave the job in a couple of years. The union people told them to pay in, that lots of people think they will leave in a couple of years and if they stay, they will have to either work extra years to get their full pension or “buy back” the time they didn’t contribute. Taking a financial literacy class wouldn’t have changed their decision , not if people speaking directly to them about their exact situation didn’t persuade them.
Since I joined the pension when I was 25, I had my 30 years when I was 55 and could retire. My coworkers were trying to buy back the time they didn’t contribute so they could retire.
* When we were hired provisionally, we had a choice. If we got a permanent appointment, we had to pay into both.
I’m baffled by the folks saying we shouldn’t teach it in the late teens because students won’t use it until their early 20s. Don’t we need to teach it before they use it?
Its more that they won’t listen when its a problem for future them. Its like learning Spanish 4 years before a vacation to Spain. For subjects like English and math, there’s a reason we teach them every year: we have to keep the ball rolling so that they are continually building connections. A mandatory financial literacy class in isolation just seems like a huge waste of time for little payoff. An elective would do more good, but even then, I think you can teach an interested 19 year old something in an hour that would take 4 weeks to teach a bored 15 year old.
High school is when they need to sit down one on one with an informed advisor. A class isn’t going to help, because there are so many variables. Not all debt is the same. Not all degrees are the same. Not all people are the same.
I use what we call “Business Math” to do my finances. As a post grad, I worked towards a high school certification as a math teacher, which means I took everything from Intermediate Algebra all the way through third level Calculus. I ended up in IT in education, and I have never had any use for any of that stuff in my personal life or in IT.
To be honest, after having taken a masters degree in mathematics before moving into accounting, algebra has very, very little use in the world of accounting. It is extremely rare that I need to figure out anything using math beyond what people learned in middle school. I had one problem on a test in accounting school that required algebra, and it was extremely notable for that fact. I’ve had one or two instances where I needed to figure out a formula for something somewhat complicated, and it made more sense to do the algebra on scratch paper and then transfer the resultant formula to Excel, but in each of those instances, the algebraic manipulations only shortened the amount of work and thought, they didn’t do something that was not otherwise achievable. If someone knew all the steps involved but no way to manipulate the variables algebraically, they could still get the result by doing things one step at a time in Excel, with a new cell and formula for each step.
That’s not to say that my study of mathematics was entirely unhelpful. As mentioned earlier, the accounting system of debits and credits is somewhat mind-bending when you first encounter it, if only because the words mean something different than what you’re used to. Once you can get yourself to step outside the system and try to understand what’s really going on, and see that they are placeholders for “left side entry” and “right side entry” and the various dualities that exist in accounting, it is much easier to understand. Having a strong background in how logical systems worked and knowing about dualities in the abstract, I saw the entirety of its beauty almost immediately once I understood it from that perspective. But none of the actual math that I learned in school since what’s typically taken by high schoolers was really necessary.
Of course, most of the financial stuff I learned without needing to be taught in school. With both of my parents being accountants (in very different fields), I sorta just learned everything about the tax and financial system by osmosis. While many of the concepts I learned in school were brand new, I had this feeling that a lot of students just didn’t have the same exposure to the basic concepts as kids that I did. So while I might say “don’t parents teach this stuff to their kids, just like all the other basic living concepts?” I admit that my experience might be atypical, and in my work encountering some people who don’t have the faintest idea what some of the things I’m talking about even are, I’ve become to realize that myself that in general people just aren’t taught enough about how taxes and finances work.
For the first time ever (!!!) I have to respectfully disagree with you.
Speaking as someone who took it as an elective in high school back in the 1970s: I’d guess that a fair percentage of that class didn’t go on past high school. We were all juniors and seniors. We got a LOT out of that class.
Back then, one could more easily afford to move out right after graduation. My own kids certainly could have used that information while they were running up personal debt while still living at home. I wish they’d had the opportunity to take that class in high school. Sigh.
I wonder if people here have differing ideas as to what counts as “algebra.” Arguably, any time you’re figuring out formulas, with variables (or Excel cell references), you’re using algebra. If you hadn’t studied algebra, would you even be aware that formulas can be simplified and manipulated?
It’s quite possible that when you study algebra (and the same goes for other subjects that you don’t think you ever use), you’re developing habits of mind and ways of thinking that you do use, often without realizing it.
That is incorrect.
For the 8 years I taught it, my students told me how much they appreciated what I was teaching because they knew they would need it as adults. I’ve taught math for over 25 years so I think I can identify when students don’t give an F and when they do. And for juniors and seniors they definitely do.
It certainly helps to have a mind that is able to think more abstractly and is trained to work with symbols. You can get to answers much faster if you’re able to manipulate symbols abstractly, but you generally aren’t required to do so to get the answers in what I tend to work on except in very niche scenarios. Most people could get through it by just following the steps like on an IRS form. I sometimes really hate having to deal with the math and logic on an IRS form as well as the law in the Internal Revenue Code, simply because it’s put together in a way that’s not typical for someone used to mathematics, which is in order to allow it be interpreted (in theory) without any mathematics beyond arithmetic. I often try to look for third-party resources that try to explain what’s going on in the Code in more abstract terminology. It’s often much easier for me to understand in that way than by simply reading the Code.
