Dear Teachers and Parents,
This June, during Financial Literacy Month, we have some to share.
In 2015, a free online financial education course named FutureSmart was introduced to middle school students, specifically targeting this group at a time in their lives when financial habits take hold and grow.
Fast forward to today, FutureSmart, available in English and Spanish, has reached over 13,000 schools across all 50 states. More than two million students have completed the course, with almost half coming from low-to-moderate income families.
But we aren't stopping there. We promise to reach four million more students by the end of 2025.
Why? Because this moment calls for brave action. Never before have money management and investment decisions been so easy to conduct at any time or place through the use of a smartphone. It is time to offer students more critical financial literacy education to encourage them to make good financial decisions on a daily basis as they make their way through a complex world.
From weighing opportunity costs to delaying instant satisfaction for long-term financial gain, FutureSmart educates our youth using hands-on simulations (模拟) to introduce concepts like daily financial decisions and the rewards of long-term planning. Teaching young learners how to build solid financial foundations is an important step in building financially healthy communities.
Although our work is far from complete, we know that FutureSmart works. And it works exceptionally well.
In the largest study of its kind, supported by the MassMutual Foundation and EVERFI, the University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute (UMDI) recently concluded that 90% of students saw a statistically significant and educationally meaningful increase in knowledge after taking the FutureSmart course.
What's more, these results were consistent across all student demographics including race, age, gender, school year, and socioeconomic status.
We have a long way to go to reach every single middle school student, but we welcome the challenge. Together, our teams have started a movement to provide equal access to financial education, and we invite others to join us.
Visit getfuturesmart.com to learn more and see how you can bring FutureSmart to the young people in your life.
MICHAEL FANNING RAY MARTINEZ
Head of MassMutual US President and Co-Founder of EVERFI
I was sitting in a chemistry lab class during my first year of university, nervous about the experiment we were to perform. I grabbed a pipette and, as I feared, my hand started to shake. The experience was disheartening. I was hoping to pursue a career in science, but I started to wonder whether that would be possible. I thought my dreams had crashed to the ground.
I was a boy born with brain damage. My family managed to find good doctors where we lived, in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia, and I took part in clinical trials testing new treatments. Shortly after my first birthday, I started walking and it became clear my intelligence function was unaffected. So, in some sense, I was lucky. Still, I couldn't do some things growing up. Both hands shook, especially when I was nervous or embarrassed. My left hand was much worse than my right, so I learned to write and do simple tasks with my right hand, but it wasn't easy to do anything precisely.
As a teenager, I faced a lot of bullying at school. Feeling alone, I joined a study group called "The natural world". I thought that getting into the world of animals would keep me away from people. That's how I came into the field of biology. At university, I enjoyed the lectures in my science classes. Many lab tasks proved impossible, however. As I struggled with my mood, I read a book about depression. From then on, the physiology of mental disorders became my scientific passion. I looked into what was being done locally and was excited to discover a lab that did behavioral experiments in rats to study depression.
At the end of my second year, I approached the professor of the lab to see whether I could work with her. I was afraid to admit I couldn't do some lab tasks. To my relief, she was completely supportive. She set me to work performing behavioral experiments for others in the lab with the help of colleagues. I loved the supportive atmosphere and stayed there to complete my master's and Ph.D.
I've come to realize that my hands aren't the barrier I thought they were. By making use of my abilities and working as part of a team, I've been able to follow my passions. I've also realized that there's much more to being a scientist than performing the physical labor. I may not collect all the data in my papers, but I'm fully capable of designing experiments and interpreting results, which, to me, is the most exciting part of science.
Imagine a simple blood test that could flag most kinds of cancers at the earliest, most curable stage. Liquid biopsies could, in theory, detect a tumor (肿瘤) well before it could be found by touch, symptoms or imaging. Blood tests could avoid the need for surgeons to cut tissue samples and make it possible to reveal cancer hiding in places needles and scalpels cannot safely reach. They could also determine what type of cancer is taking root to help doctors decide what treatment might work best to destroy it.
Liquid biopsies are not yet in hand, because it is hard to find definitive cancer signals in a tube of blood, but progress in recent years has been impressive. Last year the journal Science published the first big prospective study of a liquid biopsy for DNA and proteins from multiple types of cancers. Though far from perfect, the blood test called CancerSEEK found 26 tumors that had not been discovered with conventional screenings.
Liquid biopsies can rely on a variety of biomarkers in addition to tumor DNA and proteins, such as free-floating cancer cells themselves. But what makes the search difficult, Ana Robles, a cancer biologist of the National Cancer Institute, explains, is that "if you have an early-stage cancer or certain types of cancer, there might not be a lot of tumor DNA," and tests might miss it. The ideal blood test will be both very specific and very sensitive so that even tiny tumors can be found. To tackle this challenge, CancerSEEK looks for cancer-specific mutations (突变) on 16 genes, and for eight proteins that are linked to cancer and for which there are highly sensitive tests.
Simple detection is not the only goal. An ideal liquid biopsy will also determine the likely location of the cancer so that it can be treated. "Mutations are often shared among different kinds of cancer, so if you find them in blood, you don't know if that mutation is coming from a stomach cancer or lung cancer," says Anirban Maitra, a cancer scientist at the Anderson Cancer Center. To solve that problem, some newer liquid biopsies look for changes in gene expression. Such changes, Maitra notes, are "more organ-specific".
On the nearer horizon are liquid biopsies to help people already diagnosed with cancer. Last year the government approved the first two such tests, which scan for tumor DNA so doctors can select mutation-targeted drugs. Scientists are working on blood tests to detect the first signs of cancer recurrence (复发) in patients who have completed treatment. This work is moving fast, but does it save lives?
That is the question companies such as Thrive and Grail must answer for their broadly ambitious screening tests. "These companies have to prove that they can detect early cancer and, more important, that the early detection can have an impact on cancer survival," Maitra observes.
Technology seems to discourage slow, immersive reading. Reading on a screen, particularly a phone screen, tires your eyes and makes it harder for you to keep your place. So online writing tends to be more skimmable and list-like than print. The cognitive neuroscientist Mary Walt argued recently that this "new norm" of skim reading is producing "an invisible, game-changing transformation" in how readers process words. The neuronal circuit that sustains the brain's capacity to read now favors the rapid absorption of information, rather than skills developed by deeper reading, like critical analysis.
We shouldn't overplay this danger. All readers skim. Skimming is the skill we acquire as children as we learn to read more skillfully. From about the age of nine, our eyes start to bounce around the page, reading only about a quarter of the words properly, and filling in the gaps by inference. Nor is there anything new in these fears about declining attention spans. So far, the anxieties have proved to be false alarms. "Quite a few critics have been worried about attention span lately and see very short stories as signs of cultural decline," the American author Selvin Brown wrote. "No one ever said that poems were evidence of short attention spans."
And yet the Internet has certainly changed the way we read. For a start, it means that there is more to read, because more people than ever are writing. If you time travelled just a few decades into the past, you would wonder at how little writing was happening outside a classroom. And digital writing is meant for rapid release and response. An online article starts forming a comment string underneath as soon as it is published. This mode of writing and reading can be interactive and fun. But often it treats other people's words as something to be quickly harvested as fodder to say something else. Everyone talks over the top of everyone else, desperate to be heard.
Perhaps we should slow down. Reading is constantly promoted as a social good and source of personal achievement. But this advocacy often emphasizes "enthusiastic", "passionate" or "eager" reading, none of which adjectives suggest slow, quiet absorption.
To a slow reader, a piece of writing can only be fully understood by immersing oneself in the words and their slow comprehension of a line of thought. The slow reader is like a swimmer who stops counting the number of pool laps he has done and just enjoys how his body feels and moves in water.
The human need for this kind of deep reading is too tenacious for any new technology to destroy. We often assume that technological change can't be stopped and happens in one direction, so that older media like "dead-tree" books are kicked out by newer, more virtual forms. In practice, older technologies can coexist with new ones. The Kindle has not killed off the printed book any more than the car killed off the bicycle. We still want to enjoy slowly-formed ideas and carefully-chosen words. Even in a fast-moving age, there is time for slow reading.
Adults are often embarrassed about asking for aid. It's an act that can make people feel emotionally unsafe. Seeking assistance can feel like you are broadcasting your incompetence.
New research suggests young children don't seek help in school, even when they need it, for the same reason. Until recently, psychologists assumed that children did not start to care about their reputation and their friends' thoughts about them until around age nine.
But our research suggests that as early as age seven, children begin to connect asking for help with looking incompetent in front of others. At some point, every child struggles in the classroom.
To learn more about how children think about reputation, we created simple stories and then asked children questions about these situations to allow kids to showcase their thinking.
Across several studies, we asked 576 children, ages four to nine, to predict the behavior of two kids in a story. One of the characters genuinely wanted to be smart, and the other merely wanted to seem smart to others. In one study, we told children that both kids did poorly on a test. The four-year-olds were equally likely to choose either of the two kids as the one who would seek help. But by age seven or eight, children thought that the kid who wanted to seem smart would be less likely to ask for assistance. And children's expectations were truly "reputational" in nature-they were specifically thinking about how the characters would act in front of others. When assistance could be sought privately (on a computer rather than in person), children thought both characters were equally likely to ask for it.
Teachers could give children more opportunities to seek assistance privately. They should also help students realize asking questions in front of others as normal, positive behavior. Parents could point out how a child's question kicked off a valuable conversation in which the entire family got to talk and learn together. Adults could praise kids for seeking assistance. These responses send a strong signal that other people value a willingness to ask for aid and that seeking help is part of a path to success.
A. Kids could be afraid to ask their parents for help.
B. Seeking help could even be taught as socially desirable.
C. In another study we told them that only one kid did poorly.
D. Such reputational barriers likely require reputation-based solutions.
E. The moment you ask for directions, after all, you reveal that you are lost.
F. But if they are afraid to ask for help because their classmates are watching, learning will suffer.
G. We then asked which of these characters would be more likely to raise their hand in front of their class to ask the teacher for help.
As a child growing up in the 1980s, Marlene Irvin took many trips to Joyland, an amusement park in her hometown of Wichita, Kansas. She got excited the moment her family drove into Joyland's parking lot. "The carousel circling at the entrance to the park was always the 1 for me," Marlene said. "I could watch the horses for hours."
Joyland certainly made a/an 2 impression on Marlene, as she got her "first real job" years later at Wichita's Chance Manufacturing, the largest maker of amusement park rides in the world at the time. Marlene started in the fiberglass workshop, where the carousel horses' frames, along with parts for Ferris wheels, roller coasters, and other rides, were pieced together. She 3 found her way to Chance's art and decoration department, becoming one of the lead horse artists. Then, after working at Chance for nearly fifteen years, Marlene decided to start her own business, focusing on carousel restoration.
Around the same time, Joyland started experiencing a 4 in attendance. At last, to the heartbreak of Wichitans young and old, Joyland 5 after more than fifty years of operation. Local preservation organizations purchased some of the park's historical items, and Joyland's thirty-six carousel horses were donated to Botanica, a Wichita-owned botanical garden. Botanica asked Marlene to 6 the old, broken horses, and she accepted the challenge.
As Marlene finished each horse, Botanica 7 them for the public to see. Although they looked 8 compared to their glory (辉煌) days at Joyland, thanks to Marlene's artistic efforts, the horses impressed observers even more than they had before. When native Wichitans saw them, their most 9 question was: "Will we be able to ride them?" Even as 10, they remembered riding the horses at Joyland when they were kids.
Marlene always smiled and answered: "They've been waiting for you to come back."
My name is Barbara and I work at a department store. I (work) there for one year when another Barbara joined the staff. Then I changed my name tag from "Barb" to "Barbie". made me feel funny was how small kids talked about me. "Is she really Barbie?" they asked. I changed it at my other job, too and began answering the phone, "This is Barbie. How can I help you?" The callers have gotten used to that over time, ninety percent of now respond with my name: "Barbie, can you tell me." Pronouncing that long "e" sound forces your mouth into a smile, but I have found the smile is usually returned voluntarily.
It's said that for the Englishman, his house is his castle. However, this does not mean that his house is a beautiful palace that others (invite) to see. For the British, the home is a place to protect oneself from the outside world. It's a private place in which he goes to hide away the troubles of life. To the American, the home is an expression of (he). Much money is often spent on each and every room (create) the right "feel" according to the person's lifestyle. Therefore, he is happy to show his house to others.
Smoke jumpers are firefighters, trained to fight fires in places that fire engines can't reach. They travel in small planes and, (use) a parachute, jump into remote wild areas to fight fires. Smoke jumpers have to respond quickly. While a fire is still small, the pilot (drop) team members into the area as needed. Their first job may be to build a fire line to stop the fire from spreading. Water is sent down to them. Smoke jumpers must be (high) trained, very experienced and extremely fit. Their job is very dangerous.
In Martin County, Florida, two non-profit organizations have come together to plant seeds of hope through community gardening. Recently, the House of Hope charity for the homeless and people with addictions and other mental health issues partnered with Project L.I.F.T. an organization that helps at-risk teens, to grow community gardens in four small towns across the county.
The teens in Project L.I. F.T.'s program—many of them aged 14-19 who are also struggling with addictions, managing mental health or legal issues—visit the gardens every day after school where they grow seeds, maintain and water plants, harvest the produce and learn to create their own meals. They take some of the produce home to their families but most is sent to House of Hope for the homeless community.
Beyond the need for food, Project L.I.F.T. hoped the gardens would provide an educational opportunity for their teens.
"We're trying to teach kids nutrition to deal with the health problems—diabetes and obesity—in our community, but when we get into the garden, now they're doing hands-on stuff that really connects." Bob Zaccheo, the executive director of Project L.I.F.T. tells Guideposts. org.
The gardens also offer the teens professional skills that can help them find work later in their largely rural county. Beyond skills, this project has helped the teens find confidence and hope for their futures.
So far, the four gardens around Martin County have generated 100 pounds of produce for House of Hope and the community at large. Although the amount of food can't meet the greater need of the area, the program is an opportunity to teach kids that the importance of giving back is just as valuable as the food they're harvesting.
"You see a major shift in the thinking of these kids," Zaccheo says. "You see them giving. The kids are learning to give at a bigger level than they've ever been able to give at before."
The four gardens were built only to provide an educational opportunity for at-risk teens.
