What is Lifestyle Math?
Lifestyle Math complements the Career Choices experience as it reinforces math skills by helping students explore the financial costs of their ideal lifestyle.
By demonstrating the personal relevance math has in daily life—today and in the future––Lifestyle Math motivates students to apply themselves to their math studies and helps them prove to themselves that they can do math if they try.
An expanded version of the budget exercise in chapter four of Career Choices, Lifestyle Math begins with the same premise––asking young people to think about and plan for the kind of life they want to have by age 29. As students work through each line item in their idealized budget, they not only discover the need for career planning, but they also internalize how essential math is to the achievement of their dreams and goals.
Students also encounter each of the Common Core State Standard for Mathematical Practice:
- Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
- Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
- Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
- Model with mathematics.
- Use appropriate tools strategically.
- Attend to precision.
- Look for and make use of structure.
- Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.
Lifestyle Math also helps to alleviate some of the anxiety students have about the future. Complicated financial literacy and life planning issues are reduced to essential mathematical concepts they already know as students practice with:
- Simple and compounded interest
- Affordability indexes
- Insurance deductibles
- Planning nutritious menus
- Saving for emergencies and retirement
- Calculating net income from gross earnings
- Estimating annual earning potential from hourly pay rates
- Adjusting spending when economic conditions warrant
- Federal financial aid and student loans
Finally, LifestyleMath.com, the online correction tool for Lifestyle Math, makes personalized math possible. As students develop a budget for their
desired lifestyle, they’ll check their math computations using this web-based instrument.
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