Jack London on money
Education seemed to him like a chartroom. He had no fear of unknown books, he knew that he didn't get lost easily, and he had already spent enough time in it to know what coasts he wanted to explore. Irving Stone
I don't know if the teaching scenario in this article is teaching the new way or the old way. This is not so important if the students stay in school is beneficial because it develops functional literacy. The scenario was developed as part of the FinQ programme and was created as a learning journey designed to develop literacy in a financial context for young people in secondary schools. I present the scenario as a methodological aid for teachers who wish to guide them towards reading not only as a precious cultural technique, but also as a functional method of inquiry. At the same time, the teaching scenario should be seen as a procedure for preparing young people for the life they will live in a world organised by means of advanced communication technologies, in which it will be increasingly difficult to find out what happened in the world, how it happened and why it happened. The scenario has three phases - initiation (Access), reception (Source) and expertise (Explore).
Access
1. Estimate the average price of your breakfast. Find out exact price of it. How many 1st class letters can be sent to a recipient in your country for this money?
2. Discuss situations in the life of a literary or film character whose wealth is complicated his or her relationship with other people. How did this character deal money problems with?
Source
He slept heavily all night, and did not stir until aroused by the postman on his morning round. Martin felt tired and passive, and went through his letters aimlessly. One thin envelope, from a robber magazine, contained a check for twenty-two dollars. He had been dunning for it for a year and a half. He noted its amount apathetically. The old-time thrill at receiving a publisher's check was gone. Unlike his earlier checks, this one was not pregnant with promise of great things to come. To him it was a check for twenty-two dollars, that was all, and it would buy him something to eat.
Another check was in the same mail, sent from a New York weekly in payment for some humorous verse which had been accepted months before. It was for ten dollars. An idea came to him, which he calmly considered. He did not know what he was going to do, and he felt in no hurry to do anything. In the meantime he must live. Also he owed numerous debts. Would it not be a paying investment to put stamps on the huge pile of manuscripts under the table and start them on their travels again? One or two of them might be accepted. That would help him to live. He decided on the investment, and, after he had cashed the checks at the bank down in Oakland, he bought ten dollars՚ worth of postage stamps. The thought of going home to cook breakfast in his stuffy little room was repulsive to him. For the first time he refused to consider his debts. He knew that in his room he could manufacture a substantial breakfast at a cost of from fifteen to twenty cents. But, instead, he went into the Forum Cafe and ordered a breakfast that cost two dollars.
(Jack London: Martin Eden)
Explore
1. Assume that the amounts in the passage represent the value in euros. In your opinion, is Martin's income high? Use the information about the average price of your breakfast.
2. What circumstances might have contributed to Martin ceasing to feel joy when he received the publisher's cheque? Divide these circumstances into subjective and objective. Explain the impact of these circumstances using a concept map.
3. Compare Martin´s financial decision making and decisions of literary or film character. Draw three conclusions about money in a person's life from the comparison.
4. Guess what led Martin Eden to make the investment. Was it risky? How can this be determined?
5. What does Jack London's text not directly discuss? Ask about one thing that you did not find an answer to in the text.
6. Locate four pieces of information in the passage that might be helpful in figuring out the time value of money that Jack London writes about. Justify your choice.
7. What information do you need to find out how old Jack London was when the situation in the text took place? How do you obtain this information? Which way will you use it? Make your search.
The learning journey with students can be approached from two directions. The first access draws the students' attention to a known fact from their life. They will probably talk about breakfast more than once - I consider breakfast to be a standard experience for them. First, then, the students roughly estimate the cost of their breakfast. Then they will try to find out this price more accurately. In this way, we let them formulate and test a hypothesis about a fact in a small space. Right at the start, we can invite students to follow a simple line of enquiry - to make a simple conjecture and then to determine more precisely what the price of breakfast is. But this input is not to find out whether the students have remembered something, it is not testing, rather it is an expression of helpful attention, the focal point of which is the students, their lives and habits. If this input can be used to gain insight into anything, it is first whether students have a realistic idea of prices. Combining breakfast with the sending of registered letters may raise eyebrows among the digital natives in the classroom - unless they are philatelists or valuables connoisseurs. This question, will probably require a brief inquiry, too. The key word in this access is the word price, which frames the context of students' thinking - implicit in the notion of price is money, and the notion of money is also implicated in the expectation that students will read the text in a financial context, for example, to capture prices, and therefore money, better, more accurately and more quickly.
The second access is different. If you want to remind students of something, for example to review something with them in a literature lesson, this can also be done by asking them to think of a character who got into trouble because of possessions or money. Tentatively expect both Scrooge McDuck and Don Corleone. You can assume that some students will also remember characters from literature lessons. Money also figures in the final question of the second access. The concept of money in the question again, this time explicitly, frames the context of the students' thinking. With this question we also prepare them for reading, during which they will take into account the financial information in the text. To operate with concept of money in the entry questions is only one of the means that the teacher can put the students thoughts into financial context. Teaching according to this scenario can be approached from two sides, but it is true that the both alternatives are navigated by a single methodological principle; both tasks emphasize the students' experience, while knowledge can also be understood as experience, as its specific type.
Reading an excerpt from Jack London's autobiographical novel should go smoothly and quickly. The text is short, to the point, informative, a no-brainer. Studentss can gain a better understanding of financial concepts such as check, dollar, amount, buy, payment, debt, investment, cash, cent, cost. The concepts are brought into students' minds by reading, through the text, and with relative accuracy, help them to create a mental map of meanings and relations - a financial context. However, information about financial circumstances is not exhaustive. The passage, after all, only indikates a fraction of the reality; it is only part of a bigger picture. As readers, we do not have a complete picture; the text does not convey much, and so creates opportunity for exploration. It is opportunity to find an interesting subject to explore, for example, by asking What is the text not saying? In this way, studentss can be made to think about the text in a financial context, too: if a financial concept appears in a new question about the text, we can be more or less sure that students' thinking will develop in a financial context. By asking a new question, the student has marked out something unknown about finance and financial relations, something that can be uncovered and so learn something new about it.
Input stimuli before reading the text will make the passage more receptive when read: students will spot breakfast in the text, the price of it, the sending of letters, the particular situation of a character in financially limited circumstances. They will accept all or at least some of these parts of the text more readily because they have updated existing areas of personal knowledge before reading. With input cues, the reception of the text can be more comfortable, clear, and accessible than a reading given by a dry statement such as, "Jack London was a famous writer, so we're going to read something from him." There is really no point in hoping that students will want to read just because we present them with a text by a world-famous author. In order for students to want to read the text and for their reading to be functional in a financial context, they need to get closer to the text. Entry tasks are two examples of a way in which this can be done.
The questions and tasks that guide students through the text can be used separately, in combination or as one continuous chain of activities. Whichever version you adopt, each of these tasks guides students towards activities typical of complex scientific enquiry. These include formulating a hypothesis, comparing information, drawing conclusions, generalizing, testing a hypothesis, and defining assumptions for further investigation. The thought operations that students will carry out through these tasks will take place through financial concepts - these are likely to cause them to grasp the situation depicted in the text more accurately in their thinking, and so they are likely to understand it better. Each exploratory task in the scenario is based on methodological principles: for example, the first task emphasises presence, the third multiperspectivity, the seventh leads discovery.
A separate level of the scenario is its relation to the preparation of students for life in the 21st century, to cope with the new socio-technological conditions. I am thinking in particular of the presence of artificial intelligence in their present and future lives. Artificial intelligence does not feature directly in the questions, but the tasks contain a prelude to its functional use. For example, if we let students formulate questions about missing facts, these questions can be seen as basically the foundations of questions (prompts) addressed to artificial intelligence. For example, such questions can be expected: What might Martin's twenty-cent breakfast have looked like? What meals might this two-dollar breakfast have consisted of? What was the value of a dollar around 1900 expressed in today's euros? What was the average wage at this time? How old could Jack London have been in the situation mentioned in the text? How old was Jack London when he wrote the text? How can the claim that the situation in the text was experienced by Jack London at the time his portrait was created?
It is still true that we can only know what we can ask. Artificial intelligence in this sense can be seen as a tool developing literacy in a financial context. Students are allowed to use the questions and available answers to better explore the otherwise inaccessible territories of the past to which the text refers - a task set in this way encourages students to form a more complete picture of the life of a peer from the past at the moment when he or she is thinking about money and deciding what to do with it. Good questions posed to the AI can serve to refine the content of the text for students, to strengthen their investigative awareness, but most importantly to strengthen their ability to read the text through the eyes of an investigator or researcher. Somewhere in here, one might see the function of AI as a means of raising the functional literacy of pupils.
To conclude: learning situations based on the exploration of texts about real or fictional people who think and make practical decisions about finances make an important contribution to the development of students' thinking. Teaching oriented towards understanding such texts can lead to an understanding of people past and present, as well as to an understanding of how finance influences thinking. Students' attempts to explore texts cannot be successfully implemented without appropriate support from teachers, which may look like a database of diverse learning scenarios.
If learning scenarios are to benefit 21st century learners, they should contain prompts that lead them to use practices typical of scientific or investigative inquiry. It turns out that the construction of functional learning scenarios has to deal with the existence of artificial intelligence, which also provides answers to very specific questions. At the same time, it is evident that access to it allows learners to discover even what they would otherwise not be able to even approach. Teachers and students are on the same starting line in the face of AI. However, teachers should have thoughtful guidance to give them a head start - for example, by approaching pupils with ready-madelearning paths on which neither they nor their students will get lost. The scenario presented here can thus be seen as one model example of teaching that prepares them for the 21st century. In it, it will not always be entirely clear what has happened in society, how it happened, what choices individuals made before they found themselves in a particular situation, and what consequences those choices had for them.
Karel Dvořák, PhD.
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