Grades 9–10 — one market at a time
Start where every economics course starts: there is not enough of everything, so somebody has to choose. Then one market, its two curves, what happens when a law holds the price somewhere else, and why competition is a structure rather than an attitude.
4 units open · 0 in the workshop
The courseEconomics, Grades 9–10
4 units, 8 chapters, numbered lessons — each with a reading, key words, a source or the numbers, and three checks. Chapter reviews, unit tests, a word match and a writing task.
Course contents
1
Scarcity, Choice and Opportunity Cost
Foundations
Scarcity Is Not a Shortage; Opportunity Cost and the Margin.
2
Supply, Demand and the Market
Markets
Demand and Supply; Equilibrium and Elasticity.
3
Prices, Controls and Market Failure
Markets
Ceilings, Floors and Rationing; Externalities and Public Goods.
4
Competition, Firms and Market Structure
Firms
Costs, Revenue and the Firm; The Four Market Structures.
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Scarcity, Choice and Opportunity Cost
Scarcity is not a shortage. Opportunity cost is one thing, not a list. The production possibilities curve, thinking at the margin, the four factors of production, and the three questions every economy answers.
Supply, Demand and the Market
Along the curve or the whole curve — the distinction half this subject rests on. The shifters of each curve, substitutes and complements, elasticity, equilibrium, surplus and shortage, and what a price signals.
Prices, Controls and Market Failure
Ceilings make shortages and floors make surpluses — and only when they bind. Non-price rationing, black markets, taxes and subsidies, externalities, public goods, the free-rider problem, and where a market genuinely fails.
Competition, Firms and Market Structure
Count the sellers, check how hard it is to enter, ask whether the buyer can leave. The four structures, barriers to entry, market power, antitrust and collusion, patents, natural monopoly, costs and profit.
Grades 11–12 — the whole economy at once
The numbers a student will hear on the news for the rest of their life, and the two levers pointed at them. What GDP counts and leaves out, who is counted as unemployed, the cycle, Congress's lever, the Fed's lever, and who really pays for a tariff or a tax.
4 units open · 0 in the workshop
The courseEconomics, Grades 11–12
4 units, 8 chapters, numbered lessons — each with a reading, key words, a source or the numbers, and three checks. Chapter reviews, unit tests, a word match and a writing task.
Course contents
5
Measuring the Economy
Macroeconomics
GDP: What It Counts and What It Misses; Prices and Jobs: The CPI and Unemployment.
6
The Business Cycle and Fiscal Policy
Macroeconomics
Expansion, Peak, Contraction, Trough; Taxes, Spending and the Budget.
7
Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve
Money and Banking
Money and Banks; The Federal Reserve and Monetary Policy.
8
Trade, Taxes and the World Economy
The World Economy
Comparative Advantage and Trade Policy; Exchange Rates, Taxes and Development.
More rooms on this band
Measuring the Economy
GDP and its four components, real against nominal, per capita, what GDP leaves out, the CPI and purchasing power, who is counted as unemployed and who is invisible to the count, and the participation rate.
The Business Cycle and Fiscal Policy
Expansion, peak, contraction and trough; which indicators lead and which lag; automatic stabilizers; expansionary and contractionary policy; the multiplier and why its size is disputed; the deficit against the debt.
Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve
What money does and what it rests on, how a bank lends, simple against compound interest and APR, the dual mandate, the tools the Fed actually uses now, quantitative easing, and the long and variable lag.
Trade, Taxes and the World Economy
Comparative advantage, tariffs and quotas, the case for and against protection, trade deficits, exchange rates, progressive against regressive taxes, marginal against effective rates, and who actually bears a tax.
The engines
Every activity here is one of these six kinds, and all six work now. Each unit page has Start Here, study cards and a quiz; its Workshop tab has four more.
Study cards, hints and a practice quiz
Open · every unit pageTwenty-four cards at three levels, a hints sheet with the tables and formulas a question needs, and a quiz that names the mistake behind every wrong answer.
Start Here — the teaching sequence
Open · every unit pageOne picture opened in three stages, four traps stated as students actually state them, the pairs worth knowing cold, and a climb from watching one worked to trying one alone.
Label the diagram
Open · the Workshop tabDrag the name onto the part: a production possibilities curve, a market with a ceiling drawn across it, the three boxes every working-age person falls into, a business cycle around its trend.
Sort into bins
Open · the Workshop tabWhat, how or for whom. Which curve moves and which way. Which market failure is this. Which market structure. Fiscal or monetary. Progressive, regressive or not a tax at all.
Table to graph
Open · the Workshop tabDrag the bars to the numbers: a demand schedule that has to be cleared, a decade of real output against nominal, and five households' effective tax rates under one top bracket.
Claim, evidence, reasoning
Open · the Workshop tabWrite the argument out and name who pays: a counselor or a computer lab, a hoodie price, a rent cap, a merger, a stimulus vote, the Fed's call, a tariff on steel.
For the teacher
<b>This page is a map.</b> It saves nothing about a student and sends nothing anywhere. Each door opens a unit page; a finished activity sends its one summary row to your Sheet, under the name the student typed, and nothing else ever leaves the device.
<b>Hand out one band.</b> Add the band to the address and the page opens there: <b>/economics#9-10</b>. Every unit has a short address too — <b>Show on the board</b> prints it large enough for the back row.
<b>Where economists disagree, these pages say so.</b> The mechanics of a price ceiling, a tariff or a rate rise are settled and are taught as settled. The size of the minimum wage effect, the size of the multiplier and how much crowding out to expect are live empirical arguments, and every unit that touches one says that out loud rather than handing a student one side as arithmetic. Nothing here is financial advice.