Instructors are delighted by the opportunity to use the dramatic events on Wall Street to explain concepts students might otherwise find dry, such as liquidity and Federal Reserve monetary policy.
"It is a great time to be in this business," said Jonathan Peters, a College of Staten Island professor. "It's a tremendous opportunity. It's a teachable moment. It's a chance to explain these topics in a very direct way."
Instead of simply discussing the theory surrounding a recession, Peters can show students a real one, step by step. While usually he has to fight to convince them that regulation is useful, that has become very easy nowadays, he said.
At the High School of Economics & Finance in New York's financial district, computer science teacher Aristedes Lourdas is also finding it easy to engage students.
Last year, his students were so unenthusiastic about analyzing the financial markets that Lourdas assigned his class to chart NBA players' salaries and statistics. But this year, "I haven't had to use the NBA at all," he said. Now they are each following the performance of three stocks of their own choosing.
Ultimately, Lourdas said, the students are more interested because they are realizing that the dealings a few blocks away on Wall Street do affect their lives. The downturn has some worried they may not be able to afford college.
"The inner-city kids were kind of indifferent," Lourdas said. But now "all of a sudden, you see it's clicking. They're getting it. Last year, it was more like feeding them the information."
At Plano West Senior High School in a prosperous Dallas suburb, Advanced Placement economics teacher Sally Meek said her students keep veering off into politics and policy, debating the presidential candidates' plans during the election and grappling with questions of how big a role government should take in trying to turn around the economy.
