Spotlight - Students Win National Investment Competition
At Ionic Lodge, we are proud to congratulate Worshipful M. Samuel Folsom (PM) for his contributions and accomplishments as a gifted middle school math teacher. In addition to his regular teaching duties, Sam is the faculty advisor to the 2022 FIFMA Foundation Capitol Hill Challenge National Champions!
Schools are chosen to represent each congressional district in the nation. The GRASP Academy Phoenix Traders represented Florida’s Fifth .
The challenge instills students with a deeper understanding of personal finance, economics, and market securities. Each team of five students starts with an account containing $100,000 in virtual cash. The team whose account is worth the most after 14 weeks of stock trading wins the game. This year, GRASP Academy’s top eighth grade team bested over 1,700 teams from middle schools, high schools, senior high schools, and college preparatory schools both public and private.
GRASP Academy is a Duval County Public School dedicated to meeting the unique educational needs of children with Dyslexia. It provides structured literacy intervention and multi-sensory learning methods to remediate gaps and accelerate learning for students.
“I feel like if anything, it helped me more,” says winning team member John Hoyos. “Because it’s not really a disability. It’s just a different way of thinking about things and learning”.
“Before this, I wanted to be an artist,” says one of the students, Pyper Clemons. “But now after winning, I have realized I’m much better at math skills than I thought, and I enjoy earning money from the stocks we picked. I will now be thinking more carefully about how I spend my money.”
Sam says, “In 18 years of teaching, I’ve never seen any children with better math instincts in the higher algorithms. I am very proud of them”.
Ionic Lodge members strive to make positive contributions in our local community, which couldn’t have been better exemplified by Worshipful Folsom facilitating this extra-curricular activity where he teaches.