Week Six - Financial Literacy

   In my last week at The Principal, I'm getting a chance to work with the IT group for Retirement & Investor Services.  I'm continuing to learn about technological skills that I can put in practice in the classroom.  In some cases, I'll  be reinforcing some of the skills they may be working on in other classes, but I think I'll be asking them to use the tools in new ways as well.  The technology literacy portion of 21st Century Skills is a pretty easy fit for the science classes that I teach.  So was implementing a focus on employability.  While I currently don't have a comprehensive approach to covering the civic and health literacy portions of the 21st Century Skills, these areas do have some easy tie-ins during the course of the year in a science class.  For me, I think finding ways to connect to the key concepts of financial literacy are a bit of a reach.  Part of this may be because we focus almost all of our time learning about the results of science inquiries or how the inquiries where conducted, but almost no time discussing what allowed the experiments to take place in the first place.  This last part has significant financial drivers.

   In the Retirement & Investor Services group, I also gained some perspective on personal finances through the eyes of the business that offers these services.  This added to the perspective gained from working with a Disability Insurance group the previous week.  The company's business considerations are different from the needs of the individuals who purchase their products.  The people who actually sell these products to the individuals also have their own set of considerations.  Ideally, everybody involved gets their needs met, but ultimately, each group will be looking to satisfy their requirements first.  Given each of their positions in the process, the interests seem fair, but I think it's important that we find ways to share these ideas with our students.  This doesn't pertain only to The Principal or retirement considerations in general, but really to any business interaction.  It's another example to share about how important it is to become knowledgeable about your dealings and to learn how to advocate for your own considerations.  These conversations may not have a great fit in a science classroom, but I could see a good conversation about this taking place in an advisory group setting.