YOUR SPACE: Teacher gives teens the tools for happiness

Wants versus needs.

Jeff Brown tries to teach the difference to gotta-have-it/get-it-now teens.

"I sometimes feel like I'm swimming upstream in this culture. Everything tells them buy it now and it will make you happy," he says.

Happiness is the bottom line in his Rampart High School "Living on Your Own" elective class for seniors about budgets, love, insurance, taxes and flat tires.

"Today I told my class, ‘My quest is for you to understand what it means to live life to its fullest.' It sounds like a cliché," he says.

"I try to get the kids to maximize time, money and energy to create the most happiness.
That's the challenge of life."

The 33-year-old married man is a modern-day home economics teacher, a field still dominated by women. He chose the major after taking a life skills class at Brigham Young University.

Brown also teaches cooking, child development and the psychology of relationships. His Rampart classroom has five kitchen units, a washer-dryer combo, blenders, toasters and quotes by philosophers.

This is his ninth year teaching "Living on Your Own," a class approved by state standards but not offered at all schools. "I've never once gotten the question, ‘When are we ever going to get to use this?'" he says.

As in real life, there's no manual. He shows "Dr. Phil" episodes of couples fighting over money. He reads the Dr. Seuss tale of harried Sneetches wasting their money trying to keep up with one another and going broke from a star-belly machine that makes a shrewd man rich.

"One student said, ‘We're the Sneetches. We do the same thing,'" Brown says.

He asks multiple-choice questions in class, not on tests.

"The other day I asked, ‘Would you rather be really, really rich and have no relationships at all or be really, really poor and have a perfect relationship?' There were a pretty even number on both sides."

Students keep spending diaries and are usually surprised by how much goes for fast food. They learn about car insurance, credit scores and seeing through sales pitches.

The first field trip is to the parking lot. "I show them how to change a tire, how to jump the car if they ever need to, and how to check the oil."

Students get a crash course in cooking and an intro to laundry. A few don't know the washer from the dryer, he says.

There's a unit on relationships. "A lot of studies show the more debt you have the less chance to have success in marriage. Experts are starting to call it an ‘anti-dowry.'"

The point is to gain insight and control over spending, not to scare students into becoming tightwads. Sure, Brown likes to blow money on things just as much as the next guy. He has to watch - and question - his own spending. "I've had students say, ‘Mr. Brown, I saw you at McDonald's.'"

The battle between instant and delayed gratification is something he encounters daily at home with his four toy-age children.

"Parents have the largest effect on how kids learn to manage money," he says. "Parents have to learn how to live happily themselves. If they are stressed out and unhappy, basically they are saying to their kids, ‘Do what I do, and be as unhappy and stressed out as me.'"

Too bad this isn't a required class for adults.

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Tell me your stories: 636-0253 or andrea.brown@gazette.com