The Ins and Outs of Taxes

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As April arrives and I think about my own taxes, I realize how little I understand about how income taxes work. Benjamin Franklin believed “… in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” If this is true, a lot of us better brush up on our tax knowledge! I learned a lot just by looking through The Gateway resources Joann highlighted this week. The first lesson uses traditional lecturing with visual aids, partner activities, and whole-class discussions to simplify the concept of how taxes work. This assignment can be a very valuable tool, especially if you use the “What if” activity and the extension activities at the end which introduce some discovery learning to make the students think a little more about the subject. When students research things on the internet, they find out new things for themselves. I feel like they “own” the learning more, which will hopefully make it stick.

The second lesson focuses on the ability-to-pay principle and why the U.S. uses a progressive tax system. This lesson helps compare the taxation in our country with taxes in other countries, and how a person’s income affects their taxation rate. You may want to build upon lessons like this to make them more interesting and memorable for your students. The assessment at the end of the second lesson asks students to choose a tax system they think is best and defend it in an essay. Expand on this and give your students a choice of projects to answer this question. Instead of writing an essay about their chosen tax system, an artistic student might create a display board with the information (or a glog if they want to go even more high tech.). A verbal student might decide to create a live or video presentation of their findings. Some students might be motivated to interview people around them…maybe they can poll people with an online polling tool. Some students really enjoy writing and they may want to do an essay. They can even format their writing as a newspaper or an illustrated short story.

The last Gateway resource we are discussing this week is a 3-lesson series that looks at the big picture of taxes and how they work from an individual perspective. These are multimedia-based lessons that use video, internet, and spreadsheet creation. They include lectures, pre-made worksheets, and a teacher or student-created spreadsheet. The class works together to create a new federal budget and debates it in teams. I was looking around online to find ways to embellish these lessons, and I found a lot of sites that report annual salaries of famous people. Other salaries are publicly available such as teacher salaries and government worker salaries. Wouldn’t it be fun to figure out how much taxes a famous athlete or actor would owe compared to a teacher? The following resource from USA Today does just that. (http://www.thegateway.org/browse/36855) The activity was created for high school students and it includes a debate on federal taxes. The last few pages of this resource (http://www.thegateway.org/browse/33489) include many ways to present the information and activities you can use along with many of the above activities. Play around with these ideas to combine things from all of these resources. Soon you’ll have a perfect set of lessons to get your students up to speed this tax season.

The Tax Man Cometh

Americans have long had strong opinions about taxes. Occasionally in our history there have been tax revolts, such as the Boston Tea Party, the Whiskey Rebellion, and more recently, California’s Proposition 13 in the late 1970s. Once a year – every April 15 – an elderly man in my neighborhood flies the Jolly Roger from his flag pole in protest. On the flip side, Oliver Wendell Holmes said that taxes are the price that we pay for civilization, and many concur. Taxes pay for our roads, our schools, social services, national security, and many other things. Due to hearing dissenting opinions about taxes, students often have many questions about them, and the role that taxes play in our society.
This week’s picks include resources on taxes from two organizations. Two lessons are from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which offers free educational materials on a host of economic and personal finance topics. Users can search for materials by topic, grade level, subject, and educational standards. All lessons are reviewed and rated by teachers. The third lesson is by Thirteen Ed Online, the educational Web component of WNET, PBS’s leading station in New York. Thirteen Ed Online offers free standards-based lesson plans and classroom activities, online mentors, workshops, and online reviews of curriculum-based Web sites in addition to instructional television. All lessons are aligned to McREL and NCTM standards.

Income Taxes: Who Pays and How Much?
http://www.thegateway.org/browse/dcrecord.2010-03-26.3523225653
Subjects: Economics, Financial literacy, Civics, Taxes
Grade: 9-12

In this lesson, students learn about individual federal income taxes, and why we have them. The lesson addresses specific questions, such as: What is individual federal income tax? How and when is it paid? How is the individual income tax structured? What is a perfect tax structure? What are the different categories of taxes? What is the correlation between tax burden and income groups? What if the tax structure were changed? What effects would a different tax structure have on taxpayers? What effect would a different tax structure have on the government?



U.S. Income Inequality: It’s Not so Bad
http://www.thegateway.org/browse/dcrecord.2010-03-26.2753987646
Subjects: Economics, Financial literacy, Civics, Taxes
Grade: 9-12

Did you know that Americans pay lower income taxes than many other countries? In this lesson, students learn about the redistribution of wealth through taxation. They use various household scenarios to examine the ability-to-pay principle of taxation, and then analyze and compare two tax systems on the household scenario using the progressive tax system and a flat tax.

Taxes: Where Does Your Money Go?
http://www.thegateway.org/browse/dcrecord.2009-12-31.6430925202/
Subjects: Economics, Financial literacy, Civics, Taxes
Grade: 9-12

This lesson presents information on why we have taxes, what taxes are used for, and how different income brackets pay different taxes. Students also learn about their individual responsibility to pay taxes, and that their gross salary does not always reflect the amount of money that they will actually take home. Students also examine ways to lower taxes through deductions, retirement accounts, and other activities.

~Joann's Picks - 4/10/10~

Variety is the Spice of Life

There is an amazing variety of educators on The Gateway to 21st Century Skills. We are linked together by the common goal of making a difference in the lives of our students while still having time to maintain a life of our own outside the classroom. We teach a wide range of grade levels and subjects, and we all want to equip our students with the right skills to succeed in the 21st century. When we cook a meal, we need a full set of spices to create just the right flavor. In teaching, we need to use a full range of tools and types of activities to complement the variety of students and teachers working together to become productive members of 21st century society.


The 21st century skill Joann focuses on in her picks for this week is financial literacy. This is a very timely topic right now, and students and teachers are exposed to the problem in the media and at home every day. Please take some time to look through the resources this week, even if you don’t think you will be able to use them directly in your class. The beauty of these examples is in the variety of activities they include and the extension activities that you can use to engage even more of your students.

The lessons from Thirteen Ed Online are good examples of well-planned activities that aim to reach students with all different learning styles. The first resource, CyberCurrency, starts with a group brainstorming session to create a class learning discovery chart, clips from a PBS show to introduce topics, and a simulation to illustrate the benefits and limitations of the barter system. You are letting your students learn by seeing, hearing, and doing.

Looking back at the resources we have highlighted over the past ten weeks, I see all kinds of activities that get our students thinking in different ways. The Gateway has lots of standards-based resources that can meet your needs with little or no modification. Not all of our resources give you this kind of variety straight out of the box, though. Sometimes you have to put a little work into varying the types of activities you present to your class. If you feel like you are stuck in a rut and doing the same types of activities every day, be sure to look at extension activities included with many of the resources. These can help you add more variety to your lessons.

The following examples stick to the theme of financial literacy learning, but they can easily be adapted to another skill you are working on right now. Do your students like to get up and move? Make giant coins and bills out of poster board, and have them jump on the correct denominations to answer money questions. Do they learn best by teaching one another? Split up the important points you want to cover, and allow small groups to present the ideas to their classmates. (Don’t forget about some of the neat presentation tools we have talked about in previous weeks!) Are your students hands-on learners? Maybe you can have them to create their own currency to simulate a store in your classroom to see how well it would really work. In the example from Thirteen Ed Online, they use paper donuts as currency. Using real donuts as currency in your class “store” could be a fun and memorable way to help students understand the limitations of the donuts as a form of “money.” Many students can also benefit from writing down what they learn at the end of each activity. Using a journal with your students at the end of the lessons can be a good check of understanding for you, and it may help your students see what they are learning as well.

You work hard and spend a lot of time preparing lessons each day. Whether you plan your lesson completely from scratch or adapt one you find online, take it one final step and make sure you include enough variety to appeal to all the different learners in your classroom.

~Peggy's Corner~

Example of a comic strip assignment for a Chemistry assignment: http://www.toondoo.com/View.toon?param=1573080

Find a huge variety of lessons on http://thegateway.org/