I'm having a lot of trouble getting a lesson right. At least my kids are having trouble and I'm troubled because they're struggling with something that shouldn't be so hard. Clearly I'm asking them to do too much all at once, but I thought that it wasn't. Let me explain. We're playing the stock market game, the fifth graders and I. I give them a pretend million dollars to invest and they choose companies, look up the starting prices and figure out how many shares they are buying. They have three weeks to set it up, with three forty-five minute class periods.
We're using Excel to set up their choices. At the top they put the title and their name. So far, so good. Below that they need a header row to label the five columns. The first column is the name of the company. Most of them choose between three and five companies, because I strongly encourage that. The second column is for the stock symbol, which they look up at finance.google.com. That pretty much gets us through the first week, what with all the confusion about making the title large enough. They've used Excel before, but not lately, and it can be tough to work with large text that slops over from one box into another. I show them how to resize the columns to make the text fit, but it remains one of the most confusing features of Excel.
Next we get into the heavy duty arithmetic. They have to take their million dollars and divide it into equal portions for each company. This should be a simple division problem for them, and no sweat for our fifth graders, but there's something about a million that seems a bit abstract to them. When I rephrase the question into a hundred dollars and buying five shirts they get it right away. Once they get that step they've got to look up the starting price of each share, and here's another place where we lose some people. There's nothing complicated about going to the website and entering the symbol. I think they are just overwhelmed by the complexity of the total task at this point. Going back and forth between the browser and Excel, remembering which company they are looking up, getting the price, putting it into the proper box in Excel. It is too much for some of them, especially the slower learners. Each step is simple but there are too many steps. And we haven't even gotten to the part about dividing the total amount for that company by the starting price to find out how many shares we can buy. That's the big task for the third week, and many of them are daunted by it.
The pictures are optional of course. They give the clever children, the ones who grasp the task quickly, something to do while the others work it through. I still think the unit is worth doing, but I'm not sure. If I could find a better framework for an Excel unit I would abandon this. But I like the fact that it's based on real-world numbers, that it uses math they already know how to do, and that there's scope for creativity and individual variation. And at the end of the year I calculate who did the best and announce the winners for each class. So there's that little incentive to do the best. For the record, I chose Apple, Cisco, Canadian National RR, and the Four Seasons Hotels. Let's see whether I can beat out my students.