Maumelle teacher gets economics lesson in June at New York Stock Exchange

By Sara Greene

LITTLE ROCK — Kim Wickliffe, 52, of Conway has wielded a mighty power when she held the gavel that sounds the opening and closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange, even if it was after the markets closed. A fourth-grade teacher at Pine Forest Elementary in Maumelle, Wickliffe was at the exchange for a week-long economics workshop.

For the past five years, she has been using the Stock Market Game to teach economic literacy. The Stock Market Game is where students get on times and each team is given an imaginary $100,000 to invest. The winner is whichever team makes the most at the end of the 10-weekgame.

“We look at the headlines in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette business section and decide whether or not it is a positive or negative story,” Wickliffe said.

She said the Stock Market Game teaches critical-thinking skills when students pay more attention to the news to see how events affect the market.

“One of my little girls saw a headline about Google when she was in the library and came back to class where she told her team they needed to invest in Google. That team won by $5,000 that year,” Wickliffe said.

She said the economics workshop at the exchange taught her a lot from the how the exchange started with 24 men meeting under a buttonwood tree in 1792 to the fast-paced electronic trading of today. Wickliffe said since the exchange merged with five European stock markets, its name is the New York Stock Exchange Euronext.

“We had a 30-minute meeting with Duncan Niederauer, chief executive officer of the exchange, and he told us the exchange has changed more in the past four years than the first 214 years. I was siting three people away from him. He’s the CEO of the exchange; he had been to six other countries that month but he was so down to earth and humble,” Wickliffe said.

The meeting took place inthe boardroom of the exchange. Wickliffe said the room was spectacular with gold leaf on the walls, a ceiling of Tiffany stained glass and a $15 million urn from a Russian czar.

Besides meeting with Niederauer, Wickliffe said the workshop, which had about 40 participants who ranged from university professors to accounts, visited with a specialist from Lehman Brothers investment bank and senior level department heads from the exchange.

Wickliffe said one thing she learned was the importance of globalization.

“During the Stock Market Game, I usually require each student to buy at least on Arkansas-based stock and this year, I think I’m going to require each student to buy at least one globalstock. I think if I didn’t realize the importance of globalization, then my students probably haven’t thought about it,” Wickliffe said.

River Valley Ozark, Pages 63 on 07/10/2008