Power, Privilege, & The Pur$e
Power, Privilege, and The Pur$e is an integrated Math and Humanities socioeconomics project. Throughout the course of a few months, the entire 11th grade class studied social inequities in our society. Everything from the glass ceiling, to affirmative action, to Islamophobia, to racism, all the way to the wage gap and in between. At first I started off having no clue about the existence of these social injustices. And I wasn't the only one who didn't have an opinion. Later as I read more articles and excerpts, I began to realize how almost all of these inequities affect me, whether directly or indirectly.
The first mathematical focus of the project was to learn how to create & manage financials plans, such as a monthly budget, a retirement plan, and college funds for our children; and the second was to learn how to verify the validity of a statistic and also know how to form a statistic given a data set. In the first half of the project, we mainly practiced how to calculate interest and compounded interest. We used our knowledge of this concept and applied it to real life situations that we would be facing soon. We estimated the financial aid we would receive and determined how much and how long we would be paying off our college loans. We also calculated how long it would take for us to reach our retirement savings goal within a given time based off the average salary we would earn after college and took into consideration if we got a small raise each year. It was crazy to find that I could become a millionaire by the time I retired, but only if I started saving $400 a month once I graduated college. I later found when we made personal monthly budgets that it was almost impossible to save that much each month. In our personal budgets, we took into account many real life bills we would have to pay off. For example, I had to budget groceries and personal care, alongside college loan payments, car payments, insurance, housing, taxes and investments. We also learned about the types of investments, like stocks & bonds, mutual funds, bank accounts,
The first mathematical focus of the project was to learn how to create & manage financials plans, such as a monthly budget, a retirement plan, and college funds for our children; and the second was to learn how to verify the validity of a statistic and also know how to form a statistic given a data set. In the first half of the project, we mainly practiced how to calculate interest and compounded interest. We used our knowledge of this concept and applied it to real life situations that we would be facing soon. We estimated the financial aid we would receive and determined how much and how long we would be paying off our college loans. We also calculated how long it would take for us to reach our retirement savings goal within a given time based off the average salary we would earn after college and took into consideration if we got a small raise each year. It was crazy to find that I could become a millionaire by the time I retired, but only if I started saving $400 a month once I graduated college. I later found when we made personal monthly budgets that it was almost impossible to save that much each month. In our personal budgets, we took into account many real life bills we would have to pay off. For example, I had to budget groceries and personal care, alongside college loan payments, car payments, insurance, housing, taxes and investments. We also learned about the types of investments, like stocks & bonds, mutual funds, bank accounts,
- Description: Describe what your project is. (Be sure to include both parts of the project: the personal financial plan and the statistics sections.)
- Process: Journal your progress throughout the project. What did you do? How did you create your financial plan, infographics and other products? How and when did you use the math? What challenges did you face and how did you resolve any issues you ran into? What parts of the project did you enjoy?
- Pictures: Insert a picture of your infographic, and any pictures you may have taken during the process.
- Deeper learning:
- What did you learn about financial concepts such as budgeting, taxes, investments, savings and debt? How did you use mathematical modeling to help make financial decisions?
- What did you learn about exponential growth and decay, such as compounding interest?
- What did you understand about the concept of logarithms?
- Discuss the Statistical Problem Solving Process and explain how you used it in this project.
- What statistical concepts, vocabulary and measurements did you learn in this project?
- How did you use what you learned to better understand the societal issues that were discussed in the project?
VI. “Mind the Gap” Exhibition: Reflect on your experience with the exhibition. Describe your role and how you grew in the process. Insert any pictures you have from the exhibition.