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 have missed anything, please share.

  • Global Scale:

  • National Scale:

  • Local Scale (Tompkins county and Ithaca, NY):

  • Personal Scale 


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