Teacher talks to Karen Hoben and Samantha Veltri

At the Beacon High School in Hudson Valley in New York, Financial Math co-teachers Karen Hoben and Samantha Veltri students give students the financial education they wish they had had themselves. “We love NGPF at Beacon High School!” They shared and credited the curriculum to help them bring money lessons to life. Learn how Karen and Samantha work together to empower their mathematics and inclusion sections with essential money skills.

How long have you been teaching? And how many of those years have you taught personal finances?

Samantha: I have been teaching for six years as a teacher in general education and have taught five of those six years a version of personal finances, all at the level of high school.

Pile: I am a special education teacher of 23 years and have given personal finances for the past eight years.

What makes you passionate about personal financial education?

Coming from two different generations of education, we both wish we had a class that had us thoroughly to teach us about financial responsibilities, concepts and potential pitfalls before we had to teach them in the real world.

We provide our students with crucial skills and personal anecdotes from our experiences to help our students become successful in a complicated and ever -changing economy.

What is one of your earliest money memories?

Sscared: My first memory is from when I was seven years old. I collected every piece that I had and put it together so that I could buy a cabbage doll from the cabbage.

Pile: One of my very first money memories was when I received a scholarship to take ballet lessons, who took the tension of my family for them.

Can you give an example of how a lesson in class has helped a student and/or someone in his family to make a better money decision?

So many examples! One in particular last year stands out. We did a project during our entrepreneurship unit (where we used NGPF sources) and one of our students created her own small company that helped women better understand themselves through Bullet news bookings, so that they love and accept themselves.

We are also rightly aware that our credit and budgeting units (including NGPF resources) have prepared our graduates seniors while they left their houses to go to university.

How did the NGPF network have been helped personally? Professional?

Personally, as teachers, we have increased our own knowledge and skills by using NGPF sources, which greatly benefits our students. We have professional the way in which NGPF has created the lessons and objectives of the lessons, appreciated, helped us to create more comprehensive and effective activities for our classes.

Can you explain how your co-learning system works? What learn from you from the other?

One of the best aspects of our co-learning relationship is that we bring our own experiences with Finance to the table and ultimately also learn from each other.

With regard to our co-learning system, we use a variety of strategies and humor (although it is sometimes old-fashioned) to best support our students. When we give the whole class together, we also seem to finish each other’s sentences, almost as if we can see each other’s thinking process and anticipate the questions that the students can have.

We look forward to mature in our co-education partner and in our professionalism as teachers for financial literacy. We are enthusiastic about all the ways in which we will expand our knowledge and skills to better give critical knowledge of personal finances to our students.

What advice do you have for other teachers in the field of personal finances?

Be sure to take advantage of the NGPF sources, or that means that you actively use their sources in your classroom or that you simply look at how their lessons are classified.

Also continue to expand your skills and your toolbox of activities and lessons, so that you can continue to grow in your ability to teach students with different skills. The current economy is dynamic and changes rapidly enough that you have to stay informed of new ideas and trends, so that information from last year’s school books is obsolete.