Genius Hour Introduction

Hello!

This is an educational based blog used to record my learning experiences and enhance the learning experiences of others. I hope you can find what you need from my blog and hopefully learn something. Please feel free to comment or add to my work and help me improve as a student, educator, and human.

This Genius Hour Project is a portion of my blog dedicated to my Genius Hour Project which is an attempt to explore a meaningful inquiry question with depth. I will be presenting my findings to my peers. My personal project looks like so:

Question

How can we effectively teach financial literacy to Ontario high school students?

Why?

I worked for one of Canada's four major banks for two years as a customer service representative. Each week, I would have students who came into the bank with simple questions about taxes, credit, savings, investments, currency and more. I was astounded at the lack of knowledge these students had in the area of finance. The children who did have the knowledge, usually had a parent who was a frequent banker and self-taught the child. I hypothesize there is a huge disconnect between what our financial literacy curriculum outlines and the actual useful financial information needed.

Timeline

This question will be explored over the next three weeks (September/October).

Goals

This question is quite multi-levelled. I hope to achieve a significant improvement in my knowledge by aiming for these goals:

- Examine the current financial literacy curriculum in Ontario.
- Examine the financial literacy curriculums in other provinces/countries.
- Explore standards of measuring an population's financial competence.
- Propose an basic alternative method to compete with the current system.

Process

I hope to explore my first three goals within two weeks. I hope to attempt my final goal in the last week of the project. I will define the success by my progress on the goals within the specific timelines. To be successful I will have proposed at least two simple changes to our current financial literacy curriculum.