Comments:
"I decided to teach high school. The only way I could move here was to teach world history and economics. And I thought, 'I can do it. I'll get through a couple of years and then I'll get rid of the economics and I'll be left with the world history.' And once I started teaching economics that's what I ended up loving. And so now I'm trying to get rid of the world history so that I can have all economics."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Price Floors (Workshop 3)
Price Ceilings (Workshop 3)
Compound Interest (Workshop 4)

Comments:
"Teaching ninth graders economics is a difficult challenge because they haven't had a lot of real world experiences. They don't drive, most of them have never worked, they're still in that transition period from their parents giving them allowance to knowing more about how to work with money. But ninth graders are enthusiastic and they're spontaneous and they like activities… they really enjoy them and don't look at them as being beneath them."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Property Rights (Workshop 3)

Comments:
"Historically, social studies teachers hate to teach economics. You have very few teachers on the faculty in any high school, who have a masters degree, let alone a bachelors degree in economics. It's always a course that's farmed out to somebody who has the least seniority. And here I had an opportunity, I thought, with a passion for the subject, to really go into depth and give these kids a top-notch education."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Comparative Advantage and Specialization (Workshop 5)

Grenawalt's students are generally very committed and academically oriented. He notes that even those students who are "sort of in the middle of the pack" get swept up by the interest and the enthusiasm that many of the students have.

Comments:
"Too many American texts present economics from the American perspective only and we really do live in a global economy today. I try to find as many curricular materials that perhaps take us out of our own boundaries and look at it more in terms of how the Europeans might view it or the people in Asia or what have you…"

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Voluntary Trade (Workshop 1)
Global Trade (Workshop 5)
Gains From Trade (Workshop 5)
What Makes Countries Rich? (Workshop 8)

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Macroeconomics (Workshop 6)
Unemployment (Workshop 6)
Effects of Inflation (Workshop 6)

Comments:
"It's important for all the students, not just AP-level students, to know about basic economic indicators… They have to be able to put those into context and understand what that tells them about the performance of the national economy. So they can understand what the politicians are saying to them and political candidates, and what that means in terms of policy - fiscal policy and monetary policy. I think every citizen needs to have an understanding of those indicators and what they mean and what those numbers are telling them."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Measuring Inflation (Workshop 6)
Fiscal Policy (Workshop 7)
How Money Works (Workshop 7)
Business and Finance (Workshop 8)

Comments:
"A very good young social studies teacher said, 'what were you guys doing?' I told him they were filming the economics course as kind of a 'how to' economics. 'You know,' he said, 'you could throw me into any social studies class - anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, geography -- and I could handle them all except for economics. I wouldn't feel comfortable there.' So the challenge is how do you get these guys, who have avoided economics in the past, how can you get them up to speed with economics? And I'm convinced the answer is through strong state councils offering courses that are non-threatening, friendly, and I think we need to attack it in two ways: a content base, so they really have some economic understanding. Then help give them some lessons and activities and things that they can do. I don' t think one is good without the other. You know, there are demands on teachers to bring their literacy training up to speed… and… econ is one more thing stacked on top of that."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Salaries and Wages (Workshop 4)
Millionaires (Workshop 4)
Education Pays Off (Workshop 4)

Comments:
"This course is strictly an economics course. It's not a financial management course and it's not a consumer education course. It's teaching microeconomic concepts. These students will become smarter consumers and make better decisions when it comes to finances down the road."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Cartels and Competition (Workshop 2)

Comments:
"I definitely try to use a lot of local examples. In fact when I started teaching classes at the University - I had come from Utah - so a lot of the examples that I had had to deal with parkas and skiing and snow. I've definitely switched and become more accustomed to using examples that have to do with surfboards and Spam musubis, some of the local foods here. It helps the kids to understand."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Price Controls (Workshop 3)

Comments:
"It's not just starting and owning your own business, it's empowering young people and giving them the ability to see an opportunity and act on it and to improve their lives. And I think if young people get that message, that's the key. That's what I'm hopefully trying to do."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Entrepreneurs (Workshop 8)

Comments:
"It's hard to make a case for the kids about the importance and the value of learning history and learning politics and government. It just doesn't seem to catch on. But with economics and finance they can see the relevance and the immediate effect on their own lives."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Patents and Copyrights (Workshop 8)

Comments:
"Economics has been called 'the dismal science' and there's a reason for that. Most of us go to college and - and we just have someone stand up and talk to us about it. But I think students, especially in high school - and even in elementary and middle school - if they can have some hands-on experience it just makes a world of difference. I don't want students to be afraid of economics. I want them to embrace it because it will make them better citizens, better consumers, better producers, and that's going to make our economy better for all of us."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Supply and Demand (Workshop 2)
Market Simulation (Workshop 2)

Comments:
"I think economics is an extremely important subject. It's a life-long skill that should be learned sooner rather than later. It is critical to get a handle on what makes our economy tick early on in your life and to understand the importance of decision-making. After all, economics really is about decision-making. Every decision you make doesn't just have benefits. It has costs as well. And to weigh the costs and benefits - to think critically about those decisions - is going to make a person make the right decisions. I think it's important to know economics on a personal level. I think to be an informed voter economics is extremely important."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Shifts in Supply and Demand (Workshop 2)

Years teaching in all: 18
Years teaching this course: 17
Number of students in your class: 14

Steve Reich is an experienced teacher, with over 17 years presenting economics and personal finance. While he had some minimal college course work in economics, he, like many teachers, had to learn on the job.

Comments:
"When I first started teaching economics I had only taken one class in economics and I was basically reading the textbook and trying to figure out what it was I was going to teach the next day. I was just out of college and I think they were looking for a large male who was also schooled in football. I was a social studies teacher. I had a history and an English degree. Economics was the job and they said, "can you teach it?" And I said, "absolutely," and went right to it and did it."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Incentives (Workshop 1)
Incentives and Public Policy (Workshop 3)

Comments:
"It was 1980 and we wanted to implement an economics program. Our department chairperson came to us and said, 'who wants to teach economics,' and nobody knew anything about economics. They offered us some money for writing the curriculum and here I was, I was a young father needed a couple of bucks and so I said to him, 'hey, I'll write the curriculum.' And we sat down (it was one other person and myself) to write the curriculum and we had no idea where to begin. We looked at the State of Oregon's economics curriculum, and we said, 'well, this looks pretty darn good. We can't really find any areas to improve upon.' So we said, 'we found this great curriculum out in Oregon and we think it looks pretty good,' and we implemented the Oregon economics program and it stuck."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Stock Market (Workshop 4)
Inflation (Workshop 6)
Open Market Operations (Workshop 7)
Fed Challenge Team (Workshop 7)

Comments:
"I perceive economics to provide a fundamental outlook for all of us in our personal lives, at work and as voters. And with that in mind - with the idea that decisions always involve tradeoffs, that people respond to incentives, that people go and they trade - they buy when they think they're going to get individual gain. All of these basic ideas are at the heart of what thinking economically is about. I perceive economics as a critical, critical area for students to learn about when they're at the high school level."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Opportunity Cost (Workshop 1)
Trade-offs (Workshop 1)
Protectionism (Workshop 5)

Comments:
"When we start the class I'm getting some of the basic economic principles down, so they have that as a core foundation - a key vocabulary for them - for them to go with. The responses in the beginning are mixed. Some of them take an interest to it. Others think it's boring. But I noticed as the class progresses they seem to take more of a stock in what they do and they become more interested in what we're doing in class. As the year progresses they start to see the relevance. It's not something that I can teach in one forty minute class or one eighty minute class to show them the relevance. It's something that I have to build upon, with the hope that by the end of the semester they come to see that."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Monetary Policy (Workshop 7)

Comments:
"When a new teacher is starting out with hands-on activities it can be difficult. One of the first things that you have to accept with hands-on is you don't have complete control of your classroom. Most beginning teachers are not equipped for that. When you're a new teacher you're not real confident so it makes you want to be more in control of everything. Another thing is you have to have confidence in yourself and listen to the students if you really want to make it interesting and make it good. Because I found that when I first started doing some of these things that my students had a lot of good suggestions, which improved my program. That confidence takes a couple of years of teaching to develop."

Classes presented in The Economics Classroom:
Gross Domestic Product (Workshop 6)