Give them the lesson about percentages. “If the stock market yesterday morning was at 11000 points and falls 30% by close yesterday. only to rise by 30% today. Will the wealthy class claim that it closed at the same level before yesterday morning or acknowledge they skimmed the top while playing it off as it bounced completely back?”
Even if you don’t get this blatant, percentages are a nice topic to teach about how ads and statistics can easily lie. Also drives home why knowing maths is important.
“If the stock market yesterday morning was at 11000 points and falls 30% by close yesterday. only to rise by 30% today. Will the wealthy class claim that it closed at the same level before yesterday morning or acknowledge they skimmed the top while playing it off as it bounced completely back?”
It would also be a good lesson to teach them about how percentages are multiplicative rather than additive, and can be used like statistics to trick you.
For example, a 1100 base and having the market drop by 30% then rise by 30% would leave the market down by about 9% (1100 * .7 * 1.3 = 1001). You would actually need a 43% rise after the 30% fall to bounce completely back. (1100 *.7 * 1.43 = 1101.1)
Awesome! I’ve taught chemistry this way!
Solubility basics: acidic substances dissolve better at higher pH and vice versa. Example: tea pigmentation, slightly acidic. Compare: normal tea steeping, steeping tea in water with lemon (hint: add lemon AFTER steeping next time!), steeping tea in water with a hint of cheap baking soda added (notice slight taste modification, does that feel familiar? Somebody might save pennies by using less tea to get the color and nothing else in the only drink available). Discuss.
Result: students leave outraged with their canteen, school admin, the government that made this happen.
It’s the only choice.
My conversational German course just voted to hold a debate about shopping. I feel a little bad, but I’m going to take the anticommercialism even higher.
Edit: or should I do boycotts? I would love ideas, I’m brand new at this. I suspect at least one of the students is right wing, but I also think it might just be what he grew up with and not something he’s necessarily considered and committed to. I’d like to not push him away if possible, while still giving him some information and perspective that might make him think.
How about:
You don’t have much choice as an individual consumer because huge conglomerates are allowed to buy or ruin competitors.
Shrinkflation?
Push to buy local, union, or from co-ops
I need to find something that they can discuss- I feel like they might all agree about those, but I could do a temperature check about local vs Amazon. At least one of them probably buys from Amazon.
I was thinking about giving pairs a company to research and they could look up reasons to boycott or support them and then debate that. I don’t know if anyone would want to argue for the companies, but they might want to argue against boycotting. I could maybe assign each of them a role in the company, industry, interest groups and government, then have them debate a policy.
I took a speech class in college and was assigned pro-gun and pro-hunting as my platform for the persuasive speech, something which I am not, actually, in favor of for the most part. I took it seriously, and did a good enough job to get an A. I still don’t support those positions but that’s not the point.
It’s actually really good to get students to research and write things they disagree with to some extent because it opens them up to new alternatives and information, and forces them to really think about good ways to counter-argue their own beliefs. Which imho is super useful long term because it makes people very aware of the… I guess non-absurdity? of their opposition. Like those people often came to their beliefs for similarly logical (or illogical) reasons you arrived at your own.
So maybe them not wanting to argue for the company doesn’t really matter, if you assign randomly and tell them they don’t have to agree with the position, but they do have to make a solid effort to support it. Even better if you give each of them an opportunity to swap sides for another, maybe similar, thing later.
Solve this math problem: 1% of the population owns 50% of the wealth and nearly all of the property/capital. How many heads would you need to divide from the rest of the body (ideally using a guillotine) to solve this?
That question has a lot of variables that need to be properly defined.
- How many are in the next generation to inherit? Passing the money/property to the next generation doesn’t actually fix anything, after all.
- If they are already counted as 1% on their own, they must be excluded from the inheritors, even if it puts them in the .01%.
- If not already in the 1%, how many would have their share of inheritance bump them into 1% territory?
- If it would not bump them to 1%, how many inherit full or partial control of anything particularly impactful, like a business, commercial buildings, or huge tract of valuable land? Because that’s likely to put them squarely into the 1% in short order, as well.
- Given the above variables, how much will the 1% figure shift? For example, you have 5 1% people, and each of them has 3 kids, who in turn each have 3 kids. So you off the 5, and now the 1% has fundamentally changed because where -all 5- qualified, now -only 5- will qualify due to the sheer mass of overall population, but you now have 15 people who would have otherwise qualified as 1%. Take those out and you now spread that among 45… and eventually they aren’t rich anymore sure (or more likely the inheritance line dies out), but that’s really complicated math.
- At what dilution point should this stop? There will always be a top 1%, and they will always own disproportionately more than others, so what should we deem a fair stopping point?
My math skills are nowhere near good enough to solve that complex of an equation.
Unless we are talking about outright sizing their ill-gotten gains along with their head… I’m down for that option, as it simplifies the math substantially.
I had this in a “math for the English and theatre majors” class called Modern Math. It never used anything much more complicated than basic “solve for X” algebra, but it had useful lessons like fair ways to divide up an estate, or how to plan a more efficient route across multiple destinations.
They also taught us why, mathematically, first past the post is just about the worst possible version of democracy, and why any of the several other options are objectively better.
Would you mind dropping some inspo? I’m a maths teacher, too.
