So we're coming out of my office late last night and I spot a nickel on the floor.
"Money!" I tell the kid, nodding at it.
She swoops down and snatches it up. "I have a quarter!" she gloats. "I found a quarter!"
"What?"
"Uh...a dime?"
I stare at her. "What?"
She studies the coin, perplexed. "It's a nickel?"
"You're messing, right?"
"Well, I know it's not a penny," she said, with certainty. "Those are made of copper."
She's nearly ten. She'll be ten in May!
OTOH, why would she know anything about money? When has she ever handled any? All she ever does with money is drop it in her pickel jar (where she keeps "her" money).
When I was a kid, we needed money -- well, needed. We used it, anyway, to spend at the small store six blocks from my house, though I can't quite recall what we bought with it, beyond candy. Lots of candy -- those wax lips and teeth, fat wads of Laffy Taffy, little chocolate bars, the big hunks of iced gingerbread, those were good. I think we might have bought comic books. Squirt guns, maybe? Cap guns? I do remember buying caps and banging them off with bricks i the front yard. I know I didn't start buying actual books until I was about thirteen, because I remember buying my first one, Door Into Summer, and I remember how much it cost, .75 cents. But that was later. I already was on my third or fourth actual real job by then.
Anyway my point here is that she doesn't need to know about money because she never buys things: they get bought for her. My mother buys her everything she wants, when it comes to toys or junky food, and we get her every book, very nearly, she even looks wistfully at. Why would she need to know about money?
Obviously this child needs to be a bit more deprived.
2 hours ago
4 comments:
Don't they teach "money" at school?
Miles knows quarters because that's what you put in the little crap-selling machines in Walmart. He's become addicting to consuming crap out of the crap machines. Guess what he's taught his little brother? If they know we are going to Walmart, they run to their banks to get quarters before we leave the house. EVERY time.
okay, it's time to teach the kid about money. Give her an allowance and allow her to manage and I don't mean pickle jar money, real money that she can save and spend or both.
Chris, you know, that's the first thing I asked her. What are they teaching you at that school? Apparently they "did" a unit on money, but it was a couple years ago, and she learned it and forgot it, like I did quadratic equations.
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