4 ms·

"This stuff should be taught in high schools." Strange, so it's not taught in USA? I always assumed compound interest to be basics and taught universally. I di

• jswny 10y ago
  I live in the US and I certainly learned about compound interest in High School.
  • tgb 10y ago
    Same, however I also taught a math course at a world renowned business program and the students (college freshmen) absolutely hated any stuff to do with compound interest. They were much happier with integrals.
• delazeur 10y ago
  I think it is generally taught, but usually as a "useless" algebra concept rather than a financial management concept.
  • vitd 10y ago
    Most likely. My experience with learning math in the US is that it's all taught in a very boring manner and they generally don't care about showing you how it's applicable to daily life, so it seems abstract and useless to most students. It was only slightly better in university.
• vkjv 10y ago
  At least in my US state, it is taught as part of high school economics which is a graduation requirement.
• archgoon 10y ago
  This is taught in american middle schools and high schools. Multiple times; it's the defacto example of how exponents work. It is not explicitly called out in the Common Core standard, but several of the examples in the common core are interest rate problems. Here's an example from the California Standard, search for 'interest'. http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/ccssmathstandardaug2013.pdf http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/ccssmathstandardaug...
  • sp332 10y ago
    In addition, it's printed on my credit cards statements. There's a little box that prints the total time and total cost if I make minimum payments, and if I make payments that are some larger round number.
• grahamburger 10y ago
  I think every time I've heard someone say 'this should be taught in public school' it's in reference to something that already is taught in public school. The problem is we don't internalize things that we haven't had to experience yet very well, and we forget.
  • nailer 10y ago
    I think you might be right and I was wrong, or at least didn't put it correctly. Compound interest should be taught in terms of examples people will likely use. So when they first get a credit card offer at a certain %APR, or a chance to invest, they immediately pull out law of 72 and do some quick estimath.
    • grahamburger 10y ago
      I can't speak for anyone else, but in my case at least, that's how it was taught. I remember the teacher going through problems on the chalkboard - "you want that brand new stereo for 150$ (This was the nineties) and you decide to put it on your credit card and then make the minimum payments. What's that stereo actually going to cost you?"
  • jerf 10y ago
    On the flip side of your point, I find myself taking weird positions on issues of what should be in curricula. It seems to me that most people carry around a mental model of schooling such that schools just pour knowledge onto a hard drive that then retains it for the rest of that person's life. But this doesn't stand up under 5 minute's examination if you look around in the world. All those polls about how 60% of $FIRST_WORLD_COUNTRY can't even name the number of $SUBDIVISION they have (state, province, whatever)? They all went to school, too. Is it really a crisis if we remove something from the curriculum that 90%+ of 40-year-olds can't recall anymore? Curricula debates should be grounded in reality, not some fantasy where we apparently spend 12 years downloading a couple dozen megabytes of text into people's brainharddrives and set the read-only bit. Also: It is impossible to understand the solution to a problem you don't have: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2943 http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2943
• wolfpwner 10y ago
  It's also taught in Canadian high school accounting class, although it's not mandatory.