{Cackle!} Tina came up with a great idea for the transformation my English 102 sections will have to make, come next spring: give them, as their overarching writing theme, personal finance.
How obvious is that, anyway?
Old-timers here know that, to avoid having to read their ungodly clichéd recycled high-school senior English papers (“Why Marijuana Should Be Legalized”…“True Beauty Is Inner Beauty”…“The Drinking Age Should Be Lowered to 18”…gaaaaahhhhh!), I’ve taken to providing defined subjects for my stoonts to write about. Last year I went further than that: I actually assigned specific topics for each and every paper, requiring me to dream up several hundred reasonably focused essay themes.
Although that approach has some advantages, it was a time-consuming pain in the butt, and it had the disadvantage of not giving them a chance to learn how to frame and focus a workable essay topic. This semester I came up with a new theme—Public Education in America—and established four broad subjects within that theme. Each classmate will be assigned one of those topics to cover for all of the required papers, but they’ll have to come up with their own specific theses. Because it’s a new idea, and because it’s a TRULY gigantic pain in the ass to build a course around a preset theme, I applied both to my Eng. 101 and my Eng. 102 classes.
That’s fine for the nonce, but my 101 students tend to follow me into 102. So come spring, I’ll need a new theme for the 102 sections.
Personal finance. Great idea, isn’t it? How often have we PF bloggers bemoaned the presumed financial ignorance of our young pups? IMHO, it remains to be seen if that’s real, since the Millenials are now being called “the cheapest generation.” Frankly, I think a lot of the kids who show up in the community colleges are pretty savvy financially. Most of them are working their way through, and when asked “what on earth are you doing here?” they’ll often say they’re at the junior college to get the gen-ed requirements and prereqs for their major out of the way before they move on to a more expensive four-year school. The state universities here—especially the Great Desert University—have jacked up tuition so high that any freshman or sophomore with an ounce of common sense has been driven away.
More’s the pity for GDU: now the kids with common sense are in my classes! And since they’re intensely interested in issues like student debt, controlling the costs of college and setting themselves up as young adults, I think they’ll turn on to the PF topic.
So…what say you? They’ll need at least four broad subtopics to begin with. One of them, obviously, could be “Debt and the Modern Student” or some such thing. Within the broad theme of personal finance, what specific subjects can I ask them to write about? Check out the format for this approach at the course website. They get four topics on which to write (and are assigned to groups to give each other some moral support and to present discussion panels on their topics). These are listed in the right-hand sidebar, with a bunch of links intended as kick-off points for research. All of the 102 essays are source-based (i.e., research papers). What topics would you like the next generation to study about personal finance?
And why not? Secondary themes could be the corruption in the Wall Street / K Street / Congress nexus, and why the Fed should be abolished. Goodness, whatever would be do for money then! That would sure test their young brains.
Just curious, how many times do you see “loose” instead of “lose” in those papers?
LOL! The “loose/lose” goof is very small potatoes compared to what they actually do. Sometimes it’s physically painful to read their stuff.
Very cool – I’d be interested in hearing some of the topic sentences that your students come up with.
Do you do debates at all in these classes? Traditional debates where you don’t know if you’re for or against the topic until moments before are a great way to get students to research all sides of an issue!
I think this is a good idea. I have not taught freshman writing for a long time, but I had success with topics with a personal dimension: issues involved in choosing a major. even living on or off campus.
Give them a reason to be interested! I didn’t allow “bumper sticker” topics even then–guns, abortion, etc. Most students are as bored by the cliches as we are.
So rather than giving the big news topics–Jamie Dimon et al–I would stick to things like student debt, benefits of junior colleges, credit card debt for college students.
You should definitely assign some sort of paper that helps them assess/evaluate political and legal blarg about finance, if at all possible. Something like “how is the national budget like a personal budget (or not)” or something requiring analysis of a set of news articles. No matter how savvy one is at making a personal budget, it’s important to understand the financial implications of legislation on how one budgets for the future. At least, that’s my two cents’ worth.
This is a great idea! A few of suggested topics: finances and relationships (talk before marrage) ; insurance; saving for retirement at a young age; your parents may have money – but you don’t – you can’t expect to start off your adulthood where they are now… okay so these are things I wish my kids had a better handle on… I hope you will share what they come up with!
I fun a version of this topic in my courses all the time. Jeffrey Williams has some great scholarly and accessible (for students) articles on the subject of student loan debt and how it shapes the choices college students make, etc. As to topics, I guess it depends on various things. I run the financing college one for sure, but I’ve also done topics about what more could/should be done about personal finance before one even gets to college; you could have them look at their future prospects for things like buying a home, affording to raise children and retire; I’ve had them tackle whether a college education was “worth it.” We’ve talked about how universities are funded and who does the work at a university (you would be surprised how many of them are shocked and sympathetic to the adjunct situation). There are loads of possibilities. You could even do the textbook situation, given that some colleges are turning to renting textbooks to students or looking into e-books, etc. There is the ever popular “should college athletes be paid to play…” lol. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the enthusiasm with which most of my students have tackled pretty much anything having to do with them and $$$.
*I fun?? What was that? lol. Should’ve been “I’ve run” a version of this…
In my Accelerated Rhetoric class, as I refuse to think about my unmentionable English class, I wrote papers on the ethics of human corpse art coming out of China, the controversy on the human consumption of milk, and should caffeine be a controlled substance/banned. My teacher was always happy because I didn’t ever pick on a topic that was normally talked about. I was really just trying to find the least controversial topics that I could think of because I didn’t want to tread on anything that you’d call cliche because it makes me very uncomfortable. Then there was the fourteen page paper I wrote for a seminar on the effects of Prozac on the environment. You should get a former student you liked to come in and tell your students that they’re lazy…
But now, all my professors in my upper level classes have to teach us to write papers each semester. It just makes me sigh because I know how to write a paper–all I want to know is what type of citation style they want.
Anywho, the themed class sounds great–you could do one on personal health in the spring as that to me is complementary to personal finance.
I think you have a great idea.
Topics such as:
How to avoid high student debt?
Ways to pay off student debt?
What are the pros and cons of student debt?
Cool idea and maybe you won’t want to poke your eyes out reading the papers!
Some ideas:
Repercussions of Failing to budget
Inequality Growth in America (that’ll get some awesome liberal papers lol)
History of Tax System
Tax systems across the world