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Rise Up: From poverty through personal finance.

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We want students to recognize the importance of personal finance and how it can help them avoid the struggles associated with poverty. So after we introduce some of the themes around poverty, we want to have them think: 1. How can personal finance help people in poverty? 2. How can personal finance help people escape poverty? 3. How can personal finance help me to avoid poverty? These are some of the reasons we teach about poverty. However, this is something I am going to reflect upon with students throughout the year. The importance of poverty in the equation of personal finance is paramount. We teach about poverty so that students: 1. will have empathy. 2. will understand how to manage finance at any level. 3. will understand how to help themselves and the ones they love. I want to empower students and help them avoid poverty, but I don't want students to think that poverty is somehow a failure. I don't want them to oversimplify the complexity of the issue. How d
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Gathering Lessons and Resources

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It is strange to be teaching a math course and not know where to find great resources. My usual resources (Algebra, Geometry, etc) don't seem to apply. So I have started to look. This is a list of resources I plan on digging through when I am making a lesson or looking for an idea. The open source text for this course, as recommended by TC3 , the community college we are working with on this course.  Finance in the classroom : It is a bit dated, but I am happy with what I am reading.  For example, I like this bean game and will use it to develop an activity, possible for the first day. Take Charge Today has a bunch of resources. Once you make an account you can download whatever you need.  Next Gen Personal Finance : is also interesting. Once you create an account, you can download whatever you need. National Endowment for Financial Education.  Easy to use, download and ready. One of my favorites so far.  Millionaire's Club Please let me know if y
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Teaching Students about Poverty

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After a few brief introductory lessons, we will spend some time understanding poverty. Why poverty? If the goal of personal finance is to help students avoid poverty, then we want students to understand what it means to be poor, rich or somewhere in the middle. In other words, we want them to understand why this course matters (beyond thinking how you can manage money to buy more stuff). How do we do this? And how do I incorporate mathematics into this investigation? My guiding theme is that students need to understand poverty on different levels: poverty of a global scale poverty on a national scale  poverty on a local scale poverty on a personal level In order for it to mean something, we need to get this down to a personal level. As teacher Liz McAnanama writes about her experience here.  My goal is to do this for my students at Ithaca High School. I want to use this post to gather some resources for this analysis. It feels comprehensive, but if I hav
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Open Source Class Text

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We are using an open source text for this course. I spent some time reading and editing the entire text. My edits included the following: Convert the entire pdf into .docx format (so it can be easily edited). Set the margins to 5" (so students have room to make notes). Delete content that we found less helpful. Check hyperlinks (many were broken). Modify exercises that had broken links (by finding updated links or deleting the question). Saving each chapter as a pdf (to print for students, chapter by chapter) Here is the complete work , with the original text as the first file.
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