Category Archives: Social Sciences

My students tend to perceive me as old, probably because I am, or at least I’m getting there. That perception leads to some interesting questions in class, including, last May, shortly before the end of the school year, a question about the value of money. One young man asked (and I paraphrase, but closely), “How much was five dollars worth when you were a kid?” Because I don’t get a lot of questions from students–though I am constantly on the lookout for them because, after all, all learning begins with a question–this turn of events thrilled me.

Before long, to my delight, the whole class was asking what I could buy for five dollars when I was a child. I realized two things fairly quickly: this was a subject in which students took more than more a passing interest, and that I could capitalize on this interest and co-opt attention spans with it.

The result (with a title cribbed from one of my favorite Henry Miller essays) is this lesson on money and how it gets that way. I publish these documents with the caveat that I didn’t end up using them in the classroom last year. However, I do have the lesson and will very likely use it at some point this year. I think that students should understand the concept of currency, especially the fact that it is the price of goods and services that determines the value of money, and that the denominational value of money remains constant over time. In other words, five dollars will always be five dollars in name, but what that five dollars will buy over time is what changes. Again, however, I caution that I threw this lesson together mostly from things already in my documents warehouse, and that I have not delivered it to a class yet.

So let’s start with the do-now exercises, of which there are three: these Cultural Literacy worksheets, one on currency (half-page worksheet with a one-sentence reading and two comprehension questions), and another on exchange value (half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences–the second of which is a longish compound–and two comprehension questions), and this context clues worksheet on the noun value.

There are three worksheets for this lesson. The first is this Cultural Literacy worksheet on supply and demand.  Next is this teacher-authored worksheet on fungibility, an important concept in understanding the concept of currency, along with a teachers’ copy for ease of working through this relatively complicated material. Finally, here is a multiple-choice assessment my current circumstances (i.e. the administrator under whom I serve) demand.

Last but not least is this lexicon for defining the words introduced in this lesson.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.