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business newsTeaching Personal Finance to Kids Who Grew Up in the Bear Market
By
Conor Sen
Oct 27, 2010 2:30 pm
Teaching kids who are used to learning from YouTube may be the biggest challenge facing education today.
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So when I decided to return from the West Coast earlier this year and move to Atlanta, jobless but convinced it was the right place for me to be, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to step foot in the classroom and see for myself what it was like to educate and be around kids 10-15 years younger than I am. I got hooked in the Junior Achievement program, whose mission is to inspire and prepare young people to succeed in a global economy. As a volunteer, I committed to teaching five one-hour pre-packaged lessons to a high school class about personal finance. I walked into my first class with a fair amount of anxiety -- what would it be like to deal with kids born during the Clinton administration when I had spent the last several years in front of Bloomberg terminals and Wall Street analysts?
The teacher warned me the week before my debut that it was the toughest class she had -- 22 boys and 7 girls, mostly ninth graders. Great. Ninth graders don't have jobs, cars, or credit cards, how long will I survive trying to talk to them about making a monthly budget? As I was relaying the story to one of my sisters, she laughed, saying how funny it was that an unemployed hedge fund analyst would be telling a bunch of 14- and 15-year-olds how to set a budget. Thanks, sis.
While nobody would call me the next Randy Pausch, I slowly got more comfortable being at the front of the classroom, and found that the kids were a lot savvier about financial matters than I figured they would be. Maybe I forgot how much we know at that age, or maybe it's the fact that if we'd call 2000 the start of the secular bear market, these kids have grown up in a bear market, have seen their families and friends struggle, and don't see the world as a cash machine and full of open-ended possibilities the way we did growing up in the '90s.
One thing is for sure, their views on consumption, debt, and risk have changed dramatically from the time I was that age. At the end of every lesson was a question where I'd give the students a scenario and they'd have to choose option A or B. For instance, in the first lesson, the question was whether to spend a $300 birthday check on a new gaming system or save the money for later. A sizable majority of the class voted to save the money. Again -- a class of predominantly 15-year-old boys voted to save money instead of buying a toy.
The lesson on credit was even more insightful. One of the things we talked about was the consequences of going too deep into debt -- higher interest payments, a damaged credit score, and possibly bankruptcy. To which one of the students responded, "What's so bad about bankruptcy?" This set off a lively debate where kids traded stories about bankruptcies they had heard about, with nobody having any sort of moral problem with the predicament. They looked at it, as banks and corporations do, as an economic choice where one must do whatever is in their best financial interests, whether it's "restructuring the debt" (the word one individual used to describe the process), or continuing to make payments.
My other observation about the class in the category of "this generation is different" is how students interact in a classroom, and how it differs from my own experience in high school. They all own cell phones, though they're not allowed in the classroom. Social network use is ubiquitous. Being mostly ninth graders, they want to talk all the time, with one exception. One week the teacher was out and a substitute was in, so the kids were allowed to use the computers in the classroom. It was the only time I was there that there was near silence. Whether they were on YouTube, Facebook, ESPN, playing games, or reading blogs, they were all engrossed in whatever they were doing. It reminded me of a Philip Zimbardo video I saw on YouTube talking about the "digital rewiring" of kids' brains. It's not that these kids have short attention spans -- it's that, thanks to modern technology, they spend so much time interacting "in worlds they create" that a classroom environment, where they're passive listeners about a subject they may or may not be interested in, seems relatively dull by comparison. People talk a lot about how to fix education, and the documentary currently in theaters Waiting for Superman is excellent, but to me this challenge of teaching kids used to learning from Warcraft, YouTube, and websites may be the biggest one of all.
All in all, I encourage everyone interested in kids and education to spend some time around young people mentoring them in whatever way they can. It's a rewarding experience for adult and young person alike, and you can't put a price on kids saying thanks for taking time to help them learn and grow.
No positions in stocks mentioned.
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