Shelby Lattimore is a Charlotte, N.C.-based 3rd-grade teacher who developed a unique system for teaching her students accountability and financial responsibility
NEED TO KNOW
- Shelby Lattimore created a classroom economy to teach third graders financial responsibility and accountability
- Through her system, students earn salaries, pay rent for their desks and incur fines for late homework or disruptive behavior
- Lattimore’s system integrates math skills with real-life lessons, and she shares them online which has resonated with educators and online audiences alike
Students in Shelby Lattimore’s third-grade class pay rent on their desks, incur fines for late homework and earn their own salaries each week as part of the viral social media teacher’s classroom economy setup.Lattimore, who boasts over 2 million combined followers on her TikTok and Instagram accounts (where viewers know her as Ms. L), has spent the last three years developing the unique system she uses to run her classroom. She posted her first video on Instagram in 2023 — just three years after she started teaching in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.Lattimore tells PEOPLE that she teaches in an area of Charlotte, N.C., where students often deal with “a lot” at home: “housing insecurities, whether it’s abuse, or immigration,” says Lattimore. Not only that, but Lattimore was teaching online during the pandemic, and she shares that she found it “hard” to motivate her students to pay attention for eight hours while not physically present with them.
In 2021, when she entered the classroom for the first time, Lattimore was learning to adapt and create her own teaching style.“I was like, I don’t know how to, one, motivate them to even come to school because a lot of our kids live right here in the neighborhood, but they’re like, ‘I’ve been at home for a year, I’m not coming to school.’”Lattimore also found that accountability was another thing her students struggled with. She provided students with pencils, paper or classroom goodies, but it was often met with a lack of respect for the work she was putting in. “There were no real consequences,” she says, referring to students who wouldn’t turn in homework or show up to school.To find a method that truly worked to manage her classroom, Lattimore thought back to the surprising thing that ultimately motivated her as a child: money.
“Stickers, the candy, all of those things weren’t working for my kids,” she explains. She also adds that kids “nowadays” have “no idea” what physical dollars are. “They know Apple Pay, they know tap-to-pay, but they don’t interact with physical money.”Lattimore saw her way in. With many of the students at her school below grade level when it came to multiplication, division and even addition or subtraction, Lattimore built up a classroom economy system that she hoped would motivate her students to take their schooling seriously, while also incorporating actual learning skills.In Lattimore’s classroom, each student has a job that earns them income to pay their desk rent each month. Students can be chosen randomly for their jobs (each with a different salary), or they might interview and earn a job on their own, which is part of Lattimore’s plan to teach her children responsibility.“If you want to be the line leader, you need to let me know what you’re responsible for,” she says, explaining, “If I go in an interview and I’m interviewing for a third grade position, and you ask me questions about being a teacher, and I’m like, ‘I have no idea what a teacher does,’ I’m not getting that job.”
“I’m integrating those math skills with the real-life of the money, while also getting them to come in wanting to do their jobs, teaching them the accountability. So the program, it’s a whole wraparound system.”Although the students earn different incomes because of their different jobs, they all pay the same amount in rent, which Lattimore says is deliberate.“My best friend and I are the exact same age; we could live in the exact same building, but if we have two different jobs, we’re going to get paid a different amount. But we are still expected, if we live in the same building, to pay the exact same rent for the same unit,” she explains about how she set up the classroom economy. “So it just builds in that whole mindset of budgeting, thinking long-term and not just like, ‘Oh, I can just spend all my money on Ms. Lattimore’s class store this week, but then I can’t buy a bigger prize a month from now.’”
Part of Lattimore’s rules for her students include carrying their rent amount in their “wallets” at all times. This means they can’t spend their entire bank account at the class store or on prizes all at once, which Lattimore hopes teaches them to be responsible with their money. Students can incur fines for breaking classroom items, acting out, and even for not turning in homework. And Lattimore’s classroom is not exempt from the real-world financial burdens.“I hit them with inflation when they come back in January, and they’re like, ‘Wait a minute, how is my rent higher now? I used to be able to afford this,’” she laughs.Lattimore finds, however, that these real-world struggles encourage her students to work harder.“If they’re not coming to school, they’re not getting paid, so now you don’t have that income every two weeks,” she says. “And if you’re not turning in your homework, or you’re breaking things on purpose, or disrespectful, those fines might be a dollar, but they add up. If you wanted to buy ‘Eat With Ms. Lattimore,’ but you’ve just got 10 fines in a week, you can’t do that anymore.”
Communal responsibility is baked into the system, too. Lattimore often employs a “teacher’s helper” who watches the class for a full week and reports back to Lattimore on who really deserves what job they’re doing or shares any bad behavior. “So now it’s not just my judgment; it’s their own peers watching them, because there are times where I can’t see everything, and their peers are very critical.”Despite this, the classroom is a safe environment for the students to learn about the concept and applications of real-life financial responsibility.“If you don’t come from a family, or learn that, or see that growing up, you don’t know,” says Lattimore. “We deal with a lot of generational poverty in Charlotte, so the thing is, if we’re not breaking those generational curses, it’s just becoming a cycle.”Adults online have resonated with Lattimore’s messaging, including other teachers. Lattimore started an online course so that teachers could adapt her system to their own classrooms.Lattimore’s journey to becoming a teacher was uniquely shaped by money, as she tells PEOPLE that she had a negative view of the education system and how it compensated teachers. Despite this, when she entered the education system, she stayed and has since built a testament to her teaching skills.
“The only pushback I would say I get is, one, people just not watching the entire video, so then they’re like … You watch the first 10 seconds, or they literally think I’m taking real money and they don’t watch that it’s fake money. But honestly, no. Some people, I will say, are a little nervous because they’re like, ‘Oh, they’re not ready for that.’”Lattimore’s response has been to “set the bar high.”…