“If Joe maxes out and borrows $20000 on a credit card, and makes $20 a payment each month, how many months will it take Joe to pay off his credit card debt, assuming he doesn’t borrow any more money from it and there is no interest charges?”
Of course, I have a feeling that sort of math question wouldn’t be allowed, because it would be flagged as borderline “family values” that shouldn’t be taught in a public school math class…
I can’t speak to the People’s Republic of CA, but when I went to public HS in small-town NJ in the 90s, we had interest-amortization and things like that in high school calculus. Or maybe it was our economics class, can’t remember, but no one objected…
We also had shop, home-ec, and basic electronic theory classes, the latter taught by a retired radio engineer from Bell Labs, so the school was big on “life skills” as well as hard sciences and math up to calculus.
