The Value of Money (the real stuff)
November 14, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
After a couple of years, Charlie is learning the different values of coins and how to count money. A couple of teachers have tried to teach him this over the years and with all manner of methods, from matching to having him “buy” things for a “price” written on a card. The concept seemed to elude him and the fact that we were as likely, if not more likely, to use an ATM card or a credit to pay for something, hardly served to reinforce the concept of what you do with those shiny round metal discs. (Though I should note, Jim always has loose change in his pockets, some of which inevitably ends up on a chair, a table, the rug, the crevices in the car, and there’ve been more than a few times when I’ve eyed a single copper penny placed exactingly along the floorboards: A sign of Charlie and his sense of order.)
When he started middle school, Charlie’s new teacher told us that she had her own method and she was eager to try to teach Charlie. And about two weeks ago, she wrote 53¢ on a piece of paper, and set out some coins, which Charlie proceeded to count out, starting with the dimes and then the three pennies.
I was p-r-e-t-t-y ecstatic.
And then, a few days later, his teacher had some puzzling news: She’d been told to discontinue teaching how to count coins and money, as (so she was told), “everything was going to be ATM cards so there was no need to bother teaching money.”
I have to tell you, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. I understand that it’s not necessary to teach Charlie to tie a shoe (provided they don’t stop making those Merrell-type slip-on shoes, which are also favored by another member of our household). While we keep working on Charlie’s writing his letters and numbers, if typing is the better way for him to set down words, so be it. And for sure, I rarely have cash on me; so much easier to run my ATM card through the machine at the cashier and not fish for exact change. But it seems not only worthwhile, but essential, to teach Charlie about coins and bills and their values, and about how so many coins and dollars is equivalent to, for example, two jars of pickles and a package of watermelon. Money’s more than just a lines of numbers that increase or decrease.
Charlie has been learning to add single-digit numbers on a calculator and there’s the thought that he might someday learn to keep a ledger and track his expenses. We found him a big-key calculator at Target (for 99¢) and this afternoon he punched in 8 and 2, 2 and 1, 3 and 2 and wrote down the numbers with me guiding his hand—something he couldn’t do a year ago.
Whatever the teacher hears about teaching money, we’ll keep working on it at home, and in stores, to buy train tickets, at vending machines—-out wherever in the world.
That reminds me of the teachers who say we no longer need to teach pencil control because our kids will be using laptops. What will they do when they want to draw a diagram or write a short note of reminder? What would they do when the power goes off? The best toy I ever bring on an aeroplane is a hard cover exercise book and a new pencil. And we share the drawing together for hours of fun that is not told to stop during take off and landing!
The same for coin recognition. Coins are one of the best ways of teaching numerical values in a visual sense as they do genuinely have a scale of value. And shouldnt we always teach to generalise from the beginning?
What happens when the adult Charlie goes to pay for his magazine, candy or Soda with an ATM card and the guy behind the till says the system is down, cash only?
do you think that teacher will be on call for the melt-down that follows?
Money is also a great way to teach about the world, to widen the mind, not narrow it.
I think you should set that teacher straight. Or ask for her cell phone number in case of emergency melt down.
xx
Kristina, you can have it put into his IEP specifically. They really have no basis for refusing to teach him the value of money because it is taught specifically in regular classes. My son is learning this right now in the second grade. No one I know uses ATM cards only, everyone should have the opportunity to learn this very valuable skill.
Time to flex your advocate muscle!
I was amazed when my (Aspie) son recently told me he’d been teaching his (older teenage) friends (a number of them) to tell time on an analogue clock.
Alex got his first bank account and ATM card last year and mastered it pretty fast though he rarely uses it.
That’s just silly. How is Charlle going to learn “value”? (More and less, bigger and smaller, relative worth, budget, need and want,etc.,). A woman who is my advisor for Ben’s home-school education talks about how her dyslexic child learned “in the third dimension”, i.e., hands on. An ATM card is very abstract.
It should be learning money AND an ATM card—there’s been talk of one day providing Charlie with a card with a set amount of $$$ on it and he’d have that much to spend. But first things first.
Part of the standard Georgia kinderarten curriculum is coin and dollar values, so Bobby’s been doing that all year. Like Rose said, hands-on learning is a real helper for kids with different learning styles, and coins especially have been great for Bobby. He’s learned equivalencies – 5 pennies to 1 nickel, more and less, and also the value. After Speech therapy every week, if he meets all his goals for that session he can get a small Coke at the fast-food place on the way home. Now, I make him hand over the money for the soda – 1 dollar bill, 1 quarter and 1 penny. The unanticipated benefit of learning coinage is that he knows we have to pay before we can leave a store, so his tantrumming while I check out has been greatly reduced. Nice!
That is sad news. Our teachers here are adament about teaching such skills as money counting…basic life skills are a must, esp. in times of a large emergency when things like atm cards might not work. I can think of a few times as a supervisor for a large bookstore in Florida – the power would go out and it was distressing to see fellow co-workers who had difficulty doing transactions the “old fashioned way.” I can’t imagine the logic that is behind that decision. Are you taking the issue to the school board?
I agree, very bad indeed. My son has trouble with math addition and subtraction but we would never abandon having him learn this because he could use a calculator instead. We keep trying and he is getting it little by little …
Don’t get me started on the terrible disservice we are doing to kids (NT and ND) by not carefully teaching correct pencil grip and accurate, legible handwriting.
…and furthermore, where does this teacher (school) get off on deciding what your son will and will not learn for you. It is supposed to be addessed in an IEP meeting–counting coins (money) is part of the whole life skills education (I have two kids in life skills myself).
IEP meeting is a team of professionals that make decisions together and you and your husband are part of “the team.”
Even if actual coins are, at some point, not used as they were in the past (which I think is likely to be a long time from now), they are excellent math teaching tools. They provided not only the basic for using numbers (addition, subtraction, as well as fractions and decimals) but have a built-in incentive for learning to use them properly–they have value and can be exchanged for some desired item! I’ll never forget when my son brought his collection of bills and change into the used-game store an d counted out $75 (including pennies) for his first, used Nintendo Gamecube. Fortunately, the clerk in the store wasn’t busy that day…
I agree with the advice above about NOT letting the teachers stop teaching at just the point where your son has started learning–that is about the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard. They will probably relent if you tell them you want an IEP meeting in order to specifically include this in the IEP.
It should be learning money AND an ATM card
No kidding–unless bills and coins are leaving general circulation tomorrow, this makes no sense, esp. that he has already invested time and demonstrated a conceptual breakthrough.
Learning money has been really valuable for Eleanor in math skills–we used coins instead of tokens for token systems and she was able to learn correspondence, skip count, introductory basic addition and subtraction, decimal places using coins and bills, in addition to the functional use.
We’ve recently started teaching ATM use and basic banking, but there is no way that I would discontinue teaching currency.
If I can have goals in an IEP for an NJ student (and PA and NY) and teach them how to count money, I don’t see why Charlie can’t be taught to count money. The students I’m teaching it to are much older (high school), and I’m teaching them to count dollars, but several school districts seemed to think it was still worthwhile.
Ugh! Here in CA, it is part of the math curriculum. Pete learned coin recognition in kindy and now as a 2nd grader, he’s learning about exchanges and getting a grasp on the values of money (ie. at the school book fair). This is an important life skill!