OELP should be considered a high school honors course. While 9th and 10th grade students have taken the course with success, we have found that 11th and 12th grade students are better able to manage, grasp, and appreciate the material.

Required teacher preparation is minimal.

Ideally, the teacher would read the material and watch the videos; however, the Teacher Guide is thorough enough that parents or teachers can confidently assess students’ responses.

The optional Day 1 discussions and activities will require more teacher involvement, but most can be done with no advance preparation. When a classroom activity requires a certain amount of preparation, detailed instructions are always provided in the Oikonomia Activity Pack.

Students should plan to spend about an hour each day for reading, answering questions and viewing videos.  Some days may be as little as 30 minutes, other days may require slightly more than one hour of concentrated effort. Generally, coursework should average 45 minutes per day.

Yes. One of the core texts, Common Sense Economics (CSE) satisfies all 20 of the Voluntary National Standards in Economics. CSE is also the sole text used in several college and university courses and is also the sole text used for high school economics in the Detroit Public School system.

Yes and no. While OELP will give them a solid understanding of the core concepts required in any economics requirements, it is not specifically designed to prepare students for the AP Economics Micro and Macro Tests. For an in-depth understanding of why OELP does not prepare students for these tests, please read the article Advanced Placement Economics: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly by Tawni Ferrarini, James Gwartney, and John Morton.

The article can be found here:

https://econjwatch.org/file_download/473/FerrariniJanuary2011.pdf?mimetype=pdf