Teachers and Professors, We Need Your Help
We're looking for teachers and professors willing to test the use of our "Master Class in Investing" with their students
This Substack is essentially a Master Class in Investing that we’re publishing in serial form. Eventually, we’ll organize and edit the material into our book, The Practice of Investing. At some point after that, we plan to create a Student Edition of the book.
In the meantime, we’re curious to see how innovative teachers might use this material with students in its current form.
Here’s how you can help us—and, hopefully, help your students!
Suggested Process
We would suggest having students sign up for free using their student email addresses. We won’t do anything with the email data, it simply gives them free access to the content.
From there, we suggest assigning one post per week, beginning with the Start Here post and continuing through the Core Posts in order.
It should take your students 3 to 5 minutes to read a post.
You could then discuss the post in class, beginning by asking students to explain what they got out of it. You can follow this by asking questions.
For example, if you’re covering Core Post No 1 on Decisions, you can ask students to think of some decisions they have made—or someone has made on their behalf—that have had a meaningful impact on their life so far.
You might start with their decision to attend your school, which not only impacts the scope and quality of their education, but also builds a sense of community that will persist long after they move to the next phase of their life.
What about their decisions regarding their academic path, which can open doors to future possibilities—or close them? Similarly, are they more interested in achievement (just making the desired grade) or accomplishment (making sure they actually understand what they are being taught) as discussed in our Start Here post?
How about their lifestyle? A healthy diet vs fast food? Focusing on or ignoring their physical and mental health?
You get the idea.
The key is to help them understand whether these were conscious decisions or things they just let happen.
The hope is that they will realize they can take an active role in building their future—their own real-life Choose Your Own Adventure.
Eventually, they will work their way through key investment topics in small, bite-sized chunks.
By the end, they will have a very good grounding in the fundamentals of investing and how to create and follow smart financial habits.
We Want Their Feedback—And Yours
The only thing we ask for is the students’ feedback and yours.
This doesn’t have to be long (perhaps more than a sentence but not more than a paragraph or two).
They can provide feedback to you (if you’re interested) which you can forward to us, or they can send feedback directly by emailing us at scrickmer@gmail.com.
Feel Free to be Creative
This is just a suggestion, but we think it is something that will help your students. Financial literacy has been a hot topic for years, yet very little has been done in the classroom to date to measurably improve student comprehension of important financial topics.
If you find other ways to use the material, please do so and report back to us.
Please Share With Others
If you aren’t a teacher or professor—or you’re simply not interested—please feel free to share this with others who might appreciate the opportunity to help their students.
We will take everything we learn from the fall and use it to help us improve what we offer in the spring.
If you have questions or ideas, please contact us.
Stuart & Sharon