fed – Montessori Muddle

Jeremy Singer-Vine has cute little tool for translating economics jargon from the Federal Reserve meetings into plain English. The Planet Money Program on NPR used it to translate the FED’s latest plan into something much more readable without, I think, loosing much of the meaning. The design of the tool is quite nice but it must be pretty tricky to implement unless the FED’s statements are much more formulaic than I hope they are.

For example:

FED: Longer-term inflation expectations have remained stable, but measures of underlying inflation have trended lower in recent quarters.

Translation: Inflation has gone from low to super low.

My favorite part of the translation:

FED: Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in September confirms that the pace of recovery in output and employment continues to be slow.

Translation: The economy still sucks.

I’ve had a number of posts based on stuff I learned this summer at the Fed. Most of it has been about the resources and tools they have available on their website and it can be a little intimidating trying to figure out how to actually use all of this data.

So the Fed has created Resource Guide Plus, a collection of activities, simulations, publications and tools for the classroom. The activities have pretty good instructions and use the resources available on the Fed’s website. They were kind enough to post the math and economics activity I worked on at the meeting (also posted here) in their Tips and Tools section.

The activities are searchable and geared mostly toward middle and high school though there are some elementary ones in there too.