A major complaint by many individuals is that school doesn’t teach students how to pay taxes and similar responsibilities. As a result, consumer education is required to graduate high school in Illinois. Unfortunately, my experience with the class was completely unproductive, and I consider it one of the worst classes I took during high school.
The first issue was that the class culture was completely unserious. Our teacher would consistently arrive 2 minutes late (sometimes more) to class nearly every single day. I understand that certain factors may impact when teachers show up, but being consistently late with no explanation is just the wrong way to start off class.
As a consequence of our teacher’s tardiness, they always had to take a few minutes to set up everything for that day’s lesson. This means that we often wouldn’t get started until 5 or more minutes into class, thus furthering the unproductive environment. Why should I care when the teacher seemingly doesn’t?
This wasn’t helped by the lessons, which were often web quests or other tedious assignments that were often clearly ripped from outside consumer education learning programs. For example, the logo or watermark of the outside resource was usually just left in the Google Doc that we used for the assignment. Teachers using outside resources for lessons isn’t something I have an issue with, but when a sizable chunk of the class is spent doing assignments that were copied and pasted from somewhere else, I simply can’t find the energy to actually put in effort.
It’s as though the curriculum was created by searching “consumer education lessons” into Google and using the first things that came up. As a result, I matched the amount of effort put into creating most of the lessons, which was very little. I know many other students likely felt the same.
The actual content of the lessons was a very mixed bag. There were some genuinely good lessons, but these were far and few between. We created a resume, researched a specific college and learned all about credit cards.
However, most of the major projects were either tedious or didn’t include useful, applicable lessons. For example, we had a project where we had to plan out a vacation.
This wasn’t a bad project on its face, but it became extremely tedious when it came to researching meals. We had to find a picture for nearly every meal, and this quickly became an annoying task that artificially slowed the project down.
The other major projects involved creating an ad and researching basic information on cars of our choice. The ad project was okay, but the car project didn’t cover things like interest rates and different challenges one might face at a dealership, which seems like an oversight.
In general, the content was insultingly simple, almost to the level of being irrelevant to the class. For example, I remember one of the lessons was just writing three different emails. It’s as though the class was designed for a step below the lowest common denominator.
It also didn’t help that the classroom was also the early education classroom. There was an ABC mat on the floor and posters that said things such as “Ariel always says thank you” or “Cinderella always helps others.” Looking up and seeing those posters while doing some completely uninspired Google Docs assignment was the worst part of my day.
We also never once touched taxes. I found this ironic because this is the main “real world” topic that many want high schools to teach.
Anyway, the idea of consumer education is good. It’s just that the execution falls painfully flat. I think the class could be greatly improved by providing more interactive lessons.
For example, simulating the experience of going to a dealership or interacting with a realtor would’ve been more engaging than an uninspired project or a Google Slides presentation. Ultimately the class has good intentions and some solid ideas, but the lazy execution ruins the class experience and turns it into another painful high school requirement that almost makes my 8 A.M. chemistry lab look exciting.