West Chicago teacher exposes students to real-world economics

West Chicago High School teacher Candace Fikis doesn't mind scamming her students or posing the dilemma of whether they should turn in a friend who has done something unethical.

And she's up for having them yell and scream at each other just like the traders at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

It's all part of helping students understand the world of economics and how it relates to them, Fikis said.

"I try to do a lot of simulations," Fikis said. "Then they live through it. Then they have something to connect (with)."

Because of her passion and innovative approach for teaching economics, Fikis was named Visa's Practical Money Skills Educator of the Month for October. Nominated by Econ Illinois, a resource for educators, Fikis was awarded a $425 scholarship to cover registration to attend the 2014 JumpStart National Educator Conference this month in Los Angeles.

The conference focuses on developing financial literacy in students - which is what Fikis has been about at Community High School in West Chicago for 14 years.

Fikis, who also teaches American history, offers a semester-long economics class that covers microeconomics (the law of supply and demand, how companies make decisions), macroeconomics (companies branching out to the global market, how to evaluate the economy) and international economics.

The class, one of three options West Chicago high school students have for fulfilling the state requirement that they have some type of economics or consumer education class, includes a field trip to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

Students also have had opportunities to talk with CNBC reporters on how world events impact financial markets.

"Most students will come into this class and know very little about the economy," Fikis said. "There's a lot of aha moments."

Senior Jacob Urban took an advanced placement macroeconomics class Fikis taught last year and served on a team that took second place statewide in Econ Illinois' Illinois Personal Finance Challenge at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

He said initially he didn't know what the Federal Reserve was, but he remembers that trip as part of the most fun weekend of his high school career.

"It was a great day," he said.

Urban, who wants a career in investment banking, said Fikis' economics classes have taught him to work with a team, to recognize patterns in the economy and to understand how people respond to incentives.

Recently, he's had some real-world experience investing when a friend's father set up an account for them. With Ebola in the news, he and his friend invested in a company that makes hazmat suits and saw a 100 percent return in a week.

"I think economics and macroeconomics are the two most valuable classes," he said.

Senior John Kulikowski wants to be an engineer, but he said taking Fikis' economics and AP macroeconomics classes last year made him decide he would minor in economics in college. That wasn't his plans when he first enrolled in Fikis' class, he said.

"I knew almost nothing. I just heard it was a good class to take," he said.

Fikis, an Oswego resident who grew up in West Chicago, said she took her first economics class in college.

"It opened my eyes," she said. "It made me look at the world differently."

To make economics more real to her students, Fikis shares with them her own experiences in refinancing her mortgage and setting up college funds for her daughters.

"I feel I get to teach them so many things they never have been exposed to, which makes it exciting," she said. "My hope is (that if) they have enough background, they can make wise choices as consumers."

Before coming to Community High School in West Chicago, Fikis taught in Sycamore for three years, where she set up an economics program. At West Chicago, the staff member who had taught economics for 30 years was retiring.

"I was hired to teach this class," she said.

Fikis said she receives feedback from many of her students after they graduate. One former student who attends the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign told her, "I'm making a lot of friends at U of I because I know so much about economics."

Economics is a subject too many people know too little about, Fikis said. That became evident when the recession of 2007 hit.

"So much of that was because consumers either didn't make wise choices when it came to their mortgage or their debt or they didn't know. They were easily taken advantage of," Fikis said.

With so much information on the Internet, students have the potential to learn more about economics but also to be scammed because of their inexperience, she said. The Internet also gives students a chance to practice what they learn by doing virtual investing at sites like marketwatch.com.

Fikis encourages her students to participate in competitions as well, practicing before and after school for six to eight weeks before an event. The school has had a team make the state finals of the Illinois Personal Finance Challenge nearly every year, and one team even qualified for the national finals.

For the Illinois Personal Finance Challenge, the students first take an online test and the top 10 teams are invited to the state finals at the Federal Reserve in April. Urban and Kulikowski, who were both on the team that placed second statewide last year, will compete in the challenge again this spring.

"This year," Urban said, "we're hoping to win the national challenge."