The World's Most Ruthless Audience

March 20, 2009 by Hamish Macphail - 5 comments

This morning I joined my 8-year-old son Felix’s classroom for the first 30 minutes of their school day, as part of Felix’s annual turn as “Star Of The Week”.

Turned out to be a fairly challenging 30 minutes …

A few weeks ago I listened to This American Life’s Bad Bank episode. It starts with a simple and clever explanation of how banks work and how they got into trouble with subprime debt. I thought it might even be simple enough to explain how a bank works to a class of 2nd graders.

So, armed with a few props and some toy money, I headed for Felix’s classroom.

The first part went quite well—the kids were excited to be given some toy money, and really keen to get hold of the dollhouse, which was then to be bought and sold between them with a loan from me—the bank.

But when I asked who wanted to be the kid with the money that will be the lender, the little girl next to me who’d volunteered to buy the dollhouse said “I don’t even know what a lender is!”

Suddenly I realized that while the kids understood about using money to buy stuff, and owning things and selling them, most of them had no clue what a loan was and what it meant to borrow and lend money. I hadn’t even planned to attempt explaining interest, but I had thought that borrowing and lending would be concepts they had got to grips with.

Nope.

And from that point on, I was doomed.

Manfully I played the scene out amidst mounting chaos—the boy who was the lender gave the bank his $10 toy money in return for my sheet of paper with “IOU $10” written on it, but he seemed less than impressed with that and wanted his money back (in itself that has a certain irony).

The little girl who’d bought the dollhouse and gave me an $11 IOU in return didn’t understand why I then wanted her to pay the bank $2 a year. When she got fired by the sweetshop because it ran out of money and I foreclosed on her dollhouse, she really wasn’t pleased at being handed back her $11 IOU in return for the dollhouse. She kept trying to cash in her IOU to herself.  Still, the kid I sold the foreclosed dollhouse to for $5 seemed pretty happy.

The rest of the kids either looked confused, trying to keep up with what on earth was going on, or gave up and invented their own games in the background with the toy money.

For the benefit (?) of the few kids who did still seem to be listening, I ploughed on. Finally, when I was standing there as the bank holding $5 and owing $10 I declared the bank bust and called for a ”BAILOUT!”

The bailout involved all the kids who’d been given $1 as bystanders handing over their toy money to the government (a kid holding a sign saying “Government” on it) who then gave it all to me as the bank in trouble.

Some of the kids will now think a bailout is the government handing over everyone’s money to banks to help them out of trouble, most will think it means the public getting robbed.  Several other kids think they just played a game where banks going bust and calling “Bailout!” is the objective.  I’d love to hear some of the confused conversations the kids are going to have at dinner with their parents tonight. I only hope I don’t get asked to explain myself to too many of them!

Ordering a medicinal coffee afterwards, the guy behind the counter asked me if I’d had a good morning so far. I told him I’d tried to explain how a bank worked to a bunch of 8-year-olds. “I’m not sure the kids learned too much, but I definitely did!”

The lesson of the story is, of course, beware of assumed knowledge. If communicating your message depends upon your audience having some key knowledge or understanding, don’t assume they have it before launching into your message, or you could be wasting your time—or worse, you’ll confuse the heck out of them.