Necessary knowledge, skills, and attitudes...

What knowledge, skills, and attitudes do you think your students will need to be successful? Are you teaching to their needs? If not, what do you need to change?

Successful financially? As citizens of the world? Those are two very different questions. To be successful financially, our students need financial literacy. They need to know about savings, credit ratings and FICO scores, interest rates, how to properly use a credit card, mortgages, financial aid, mutual funds, paying bills, the stock market, life insurance, how not to open up those "10% off" store credit accounts, etc. No matter how intellectual a person is, everyone can learn and use the above knowledge and build security for themselves. To me, this is what successful is. Are we teaching this? At my school, it is only a select few who choose to take Life Math, and these are the kids who just want an "easy" math credit. The "smartest" of the kids are too busy with their AP and Honors classes to be bothered with information like this. They go to college and are at a loss. They get that first credit card and use it for everything, without having full understanding of the repercussions. This information should be mandatory for all graduating seniors. I know, at my school, a number of teachers have been trying to get this into the curriculum, but it always falls on deaf ears. I do what I can to talk about a number of these things when I teach my Social Class unit in Sociology, but I don't have complete knowledge of all of these topics to do it justice.

As far as being a successful citizen of the world, students need critical thinking skills, evaluative skills, and the ability to make decisions and choices. Horace Mann was correct that the purpose of education should be to create an informed citizenry capable of making the difficult decisions all members of a society encounter, such as in voting. This is exactly what I strive for. When presenting students with two different scenarios, can they intelligently evaluate the options and make a decision? If we focus on the higher level thinking skills, they should be able to do this. Can they make a reasonable argument for this choice? I do not know if other teachers do this, but, to answer the question, I do believe I am teaching to their needs in this regard.