A late comment posted yesterday by Donna in response to Bubby Spamden’s first-week-of-school quandary runs the risk of going under-appreciated, so I thought I’d better bring it to the top of the queue for today.

If you recall, Bubby was trying to make sense of his Personal Finance class, as taught by Mr. Boozenporn.
Part of his confusion was fostered by Mr. Boozenporn’s odd focus on building good checkbook habits. Bubby (and everyone younger than him) is in the no-checkbook generation – a group Donna knows well in her day job as a first grade teacher.

She also knows a thing or two about story time:

Bubby should forget about paper altogether and exchange it for gold. And then he should take most of the gold and spin it into straw. And then he should buy goats. And then he should take what’s left and buy just enough yarn to knit one single goat sweater because now it’s winter. But he should leave the work undone because it’s BUBBY for God’s sakes! And on this cold December night Bubby’s barn will be visited by a pair of pixies and they will knit the most beautiful goat sweater the north woods has ever seen. The next morning a happy wandering stranger will yodel up to the barn and buy the sweater for DOUBLE Bubby’s asking price. And then Bubby will buy enough yarn for two goat sweaters, and again the pixies will knit them and they’ll be even more beautiful than the night before. And this scenario will continue night after night, and Bubby will buy more yarn and then more goats and then more yarn and then more goats and then more yarn and then more goats and more yarn and more goats until he realizes he’s forgotten to spend any money on feed and the goats have starved to death. OH NO – BUBBEEEEEEEEY!!!

The moral of this story, Baboons?

I found an early-morning missive from an old friend – Bubby Spamden, perennial sophomore.

Hey Mr. C.,

Well we’re in the second week of school already, and believe it or not after all the years I’ve spent as a sophomore at Wendell Wilkie High School, I am finally taking a class I’ve never taken before – Personal Finance.

I guess the bigwigs on the School Board decided last summer that we are all as dumb as toads about money, and they decided to make room in the schedule for us to get trained about goal setting, budgeting, savings, credit, insurance … all that financial stuff that even our parents don’t know anything about.

Well, mine, at least.

But they couldn’t think of a way to work it into the crowded school day that’s already full of stuff we have to study so we can pass our tests so our school doesn’t get labeled with the scarlet “L” for LOSER School, which is a title most schools are going to wind up being anyway, I guess, on account of No Child Left Behind.

So they decided that everybody would get 15 minutes of Personal Finance training at the beginning of the day in homeroom. Every day. And the homeroom teachers have to teach it.

My homeroom teacher, Mr. Boozenporn, says the “15 Minutes A Day” approach is actually a really good pattern to use for savings – take a little bit each time but do it every single day, and before long you’ll be filthy rich. Actually, what he really said was a smart savings plan would take a very, very long time and at the end you would NOT be filthy rich, but you might wind up being NOT TOO POOR, which would come as a surprise for a lot of us because (speaking for me, personally), poor is definitely what I expect.

Anyway, everyone agrees that Mr. Boozenporn is a great choice to teach this class because a lot of it has to do with not giving in to impulsive behavior, and kids say that when he’s away from school, Mr. B. is kind of an expert on impulsive behavior. He’s got some vices involving a handful of places clustered on this one block downtown that we kids can’t get into, but he is seen going in and out those doors a LOT. Which surprises me because the cover charge for a couple of them is really steep, and he’s just, you know, a teacher. And no, I did not sit across the street and watch all the comings and goings. But somebody else might have.

So Mr. B’s first personal finance lecture was about keeping track of your checkbook – making sure you stay up to date on your entries and remembering to write down the check number and then reconciling, like, every week, and making sure all the checks are accounted for in the bank statement and stuff like that. It was all pretty understandable except I did come away from it with just one nagging question :

What’s a checkbook?

Your pal,
Bubby

I told Bubby that a checkbook is like having an iTunes account at the bank, except instead of only being able to buy songs and apps and stuff, it can be used for almost anything. As long as it’s a thing sold by people who accept checks. How you find them, I’m not sure.

What one personal finance rule should Mr. Boozenporn teach the children?

There will be a lot on TV, radio and in the papers this weekend about the 10th anniversary of 9/11. There already has been. And it’s important. The memory of what happened that day cannot be erased, and the victims must be honored. Though for some of us, it feels presumptuous to make a big fuss over any anniversary of that dark day – as if 9/11 is something that’s actually over.

Amid all the talk about how we’ve changed in the past decade, essays about fear and ruminations on security, my favorite piece is actually this sound-and-photo essay from the NY Times about a way in which we’ve not changed. Ironworkers are building a new tower, and perhaps this is the most meaningful observance of the 9/11 anniversary – a bird’s eye view of Manhattan, as seen by blue collar heroes and a fearless photographer, perched on the top floor of an ambitious, unfinished construction project.

At one time or another, everyone has to force themselves to “not look down” in order to get the job done.

Examples?

Today’s guest post comes from Beth-Ann.

September has always been my favorite month. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe I loved the ninth month because it hosted my birthday, but I think I favored it because I have always loved school.

The day after Labor Day always seemed to be New Year’s Day. A new school year was a new beginning. We didn’t do a lot of shopping when I was growing up, but I clearly remember shopping expeditions for school clothes. There were those crisp new dresses with the itchy crinolines that we begged mom to remove with her vicious seam ripper. Even more emblematic were the new school shoes-always leather and either tied or buckled because loafers were verboten until sixth grade. Of course we wore our new duds even though I grew up far south of here where it was too warm for long sleeves or corduroy.

When we got to school the magic continued. It wasn’t until after we arrived that we learned the names of our teacher and our new classmates. Hope lived eternal for “the nice teacher” and a class without mean boys. We got new books or at least new used books and got to write our names in them.
Frankly I found summer boring and was glad for September and a chance to get back to a building with spelling bees, good grades, and library books. We got our supply lists and got to go buy new notebooks, crayons, and pencil boxes.

I remember September with the sweetness of “The Fantasticks.”

My enthusiasm for the golden month with blue skies re-ignited when my son was young. I found the start of school more fun than he did, but he always liked camp more than school.

My heart no longer goes pitter pat as August ends. As much as I love the Fair, I am careful not to go on the Last Day in order to avoid seeing the end of summer and the beginning of September. Even though I have the wistful fondness for the sweet month in Jerry Orbach’s song, I know it is the dread gateway to the nasty, short gray days of a loong Minnesota winter. The cold future dulls even the blue sky and the taste of rich ripe tomatoes.

How do you remember September?

Believe it or not, sometimes I spend an astonishing amount of time trying to find an appropriate topic to feature in a Trail Baboon post.

It’s not that there’s a lack of interesting topics to cover, it’s just that every idea raises questions, and those questions lead to other questions, and partial answers lead to different questions, and then there’s a funny You Tube video of a cat that barks like a dog, and somebody mentions a book that I want to find at the library, Michele Bachmann just said something remarkable, and suddenly it’s midnight. Dang.

Why do I engage in so much aimless, randomly guided research? I like to have all the information and questions answered before getting started on a post, which means I never get started on a post. And towards what purpose? It’s not like writing a blog post is about KNOWING anything. Far from it.

So instead, I offer you a question to consider. It’s something I’m wondering about but frankly, spending ten minutes looking for the answer convinced me that I would soon spend another 90 minutes at it, possibly all within the next half hour. And when it was done, I would have nothing to show for it except an even larger sleep deficit and whatever trinket I might buy on Amazon in the process.

Today is the anniversary of the attack on President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist who felt he could change the government by taking out one guy. Czolgosz approached McKinley at a reception at the Temple of Music in Buffalo, NY. He held a revolver wrapped in a cloth, and shot McKinley twice as the President reached out to shake his hand. There might have been a third shot, if not for quick action by three men who were nearby. Here’s the NY Times account from September 7th, 1901.

There was an instant of almost complete silence, like the hush that follows a clap of thunder. The President stood stock still, a look of hesitancy, almost of bewilderment, on his face. Then he retreated a step while a pallor began to steal over his features. The multitude seemed only partially aware that something serious had happened.

Then came a commotion. With the leap of a tiger three men threw themselves forward as with one impulse and sprang toward the would-be assassin. Two of them were United States Secret Service men, who were on the lookout and whose duty it was to guard against just such a calamity as had here befallen the President and the Nation. The third was a bystander, a negro, who had only an instant before grasped the hand of the President. In a twinkling, the assassin was borne to the ground, his weapon was wrested from his grasp, and strong arms pinioned him down.

McKinley later died of his injuries, and Teddy Roosevelt became President.

But here’s the piece of the puzzle that interests me – the brave bystander. We hear time and again that in a moment of crisis there is confusion, silence, paralysis. It’s the rare individual who leaps into action and in the attack on Mckinley, one person did, alongside two Secret Service Agents. Until tonight, I’d never heard anything about him.

Who was he? What, if anything, was written about him? Tell me Baboons, if you can, about this quick thinking bystander.

Or, if you don’t have a day to waste on this, tell us about your most successful research project.