Week Eight: The Constitution, Financial Markets, and the End of the Quarter

Posted by Paul Wilkinson on 10/15/2022

Like public company financial reporting, our educational system runs on calendar quarters (although our quarters are nine weeks instead of three months). Like public companies, we must get our data in to get our reports out. Tuesday, October 18, is the last day to turn in late data (missing assignments) for Social Studies this quarter.

Why the public company analogy? On Friday, we connected our Financial Literacy Unit with Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which grants Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. Our talk ranged from how the Constitution let Congress create the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation 150 years after creating the Constitution to the 2000 and 2008 stock market events to today’s inflation. We had an amazing week in which we analyzed a speech by Edmund Burke about the duty of legislators, familiarized ourselves with the critical vocabulary of the Constitution, and spent part of Friday’s 43-minute class learning about the Stock Market Game. Here’s a web page about the game for families: The Stock Market Game.

Monday, October 17, is the retake (during advisory) for those who want a second chance at the Unit 1 assessment. In class this week, we will continue to practice the skills and learn the content previewed in the Week Seven post, including the Bill of Rights. We will also start to discuss our upcoming document analysis with the goal of understanding “How Did the Constitution Guard Against Tyranny?”

The last week of the quarter is a great time to be grateful for the opportunity to practice using the healthy stress it creates, use sleep, diet, and exercise to manage that stress, and to enjoy the readily achievable challenge of improving learning. Have a great week!