THE ONLY TIME YOU’VE BEEN IN A BANK

I took six of my students to the bank last week to open business banking accounts for them. They’re the winners of last year’s business plan competition, and one of their rewards is that we open an account for them. (Another reward is we give them $500 cash, so that was their initial deposit.)

I always enjoy this trip because I like exposing my students to new things and think that field trips teach so much more than my boring lectures. As I toggled back and forth between the waiting area where most of them sat and the two clerk desks where the accounts were being opened, I observed how they took in the whole scene. Some of them seemed unusually nervous. One kept looking over his shoulder and asking me if I thought the person that had just walked in looked suspicious.

As I recounted this story to one of my co-workers this week, she suggested that the only time many of our students had seen the inside of a bank was on a TV show or movie, when it was being robbed or about to be robbed. It was only natural, she offered, for our students to half-expect a guy in a mask to burst in, shoot a few bullets in the air, and case the joint; for that was their only image of what took place inside a bank.

Well, not after last week. For six young people, another image in their head is of the day they opened their first business banking account. One told me this week how proud she was to tell a customer that they could cut her a check in the name of the business, rather than her personally. Gosh, I know people four times her age who still accept payment in the form of a check made out to them personally, rather than their business. So the bank trip was a significant milestone for our students, and one I hope they’ll remember for a long, long time.