Stash app: The apology to my economics teacher
Stash app: The apology to my economics teacher
BlackTechLogy: ‘Straight from the Hart’ made me want to pay attention to stocks and IRAs
Writer’s note: This post was originally published on Medium’s “We Need to Talk” on October 9, 2020.
There are very few regrets I have in life. I’ve made all kinds of mistakes (as has any human) and had to overcome some major obstacles in school, including getting suspended for carrying a knife, almost getting expelled and put on academic probation for rebelling against an English faculty department and once locking my Spanish teacher out of the classroom*. While I could find all kinds of ways to justify my teenage behavior, I don’t regret any of the above.
I still got a bachelor’s degree, graduated Cum Laude, went to grad school and have had all the dream publishing jobs (and nightmare magazine jobs) I ever wanted. But there is one thing I did in high school that I really wish I could have a do-over on: economics class.
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If you’re an English major, there’s a high probability that math is not your favorite subject (or vice versa). So taking an economics class sounded about as painfully dull as my trigonometry class, geometry class, algebra class and just about any other class that revolved around numbers. The teacher was such a delightful man, but my Creative Writing brain shut down completely and preferred yapping away at a very handsome young man who sat beside me. I grudgingly brought newspapers to class, half-heartedly circled different stocks and bonds, lazily kept track of my investments, and gazed from that cute boy to the clock every day.
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Regardless of what people say about public schools, there are some teachers out there who go above and beyond to reach their students. But I just did not understand the importance of learning how to invest, no matter how much my teacher tried. Eventually he even tried moving my seat away from the boy. My new tactic was to write notes to this dude, still trying to make time fly by. Even my grandfather, who lived to be 95, was financially stable based on investments, a paid-off home, and stocks and bonds, and I still ignored anything that was math-related. But if I could have a do-over, I would’ve ignored the boy** entirely and invested my time in investments.
Interestingly, it was another set of men who made me dust off my memory bank to realize I didn’t forget all of that stuff I purposely tried not to listen to in economics class. The Plastic Cup Boyz (Kevin Hart’s crew) are who made me want to take up investing and IRAs again — willingly this time.