Why Can’t My High Schooler Count Coins? Low-Fuss Ways That Actually Help
The self-checkout screen at our neighborhood Kroger blinked $6.82 last Tuesday, and Javi, my 10th grader, upended the entire contents of his jacket pocket onto the plastic bagging ledge. Quarters skittered next to a crumpled gum wrapper, dimes mixed in with nickels, and a handful of pennies rolled toward the edge. “I got it,” he mumbled, before I could reach for my phone. He’d been complaining all week about loose change weighing down his cross country bag, and wanted to use exact change to get rid of it.
I leaned against the cart and watched. He counted under his breath, got to 47 cents, started over. Got to 62, frowned, and pushed a quarter back into the pile. The woman behind us shifted her reusable bag and cleared her throat. Javi’s ears went bright pink, the way they do when he’s embarrassed, and he swept every coin back into his pocket in one motion. “Never mind,” he said, tapping his Apple Watch to the reader. “I’ll just use this.”
I didn’t say anything until we pulled out of the parking lot, but he beat me to it. “I know, it’s stupid,” he said, staring out the window. “I’m in algebra 2. I can do quadratic equations for god’s sake. I just can’t count coins.” I told him it wasn’t stupid, but I’ll admit I was surprised. I’d teased him about it before, back when he was 12 and worked a middle school band bake sale and kept giving customers $5 extra in change by accident. I’d written it off then as him being distracted, too busy talking to his friends to pay attention. I assumed he’d grow out of it, or pick it up eventually. He never did.
That night, I shot a quick email to his study hall support teacher, the one who coordinates his 504 plan for his inattentive ADHD, diagnosed back in 8th grade. I figured she’d seen this before. She wrote back the next morning during her planning period, and what she said made more sense than any of the “kids these days only use phones” hot takes I’d seen online.
Counting loose coins isn’t one simple skill, it’s a whole chain of small skills stacked on top of each other, all of which you have to hold in your working memory at the same time. First you have to recognize each coin by size and color, remember that a tiny dime is worth more than a bigger nickel—a totally arbitrary rule that trips up plenty of adults, not just kids. Then you have to sort them, switch between skip counting by 25, 10, 5, and 1, keep a running total going the whole time, and adjust if you’re trying to hit an exact number instead of just counting what you have. If any one link in that chain slips—if a stranger is waiting behind you, if a friend is talking to you, if your working memory is already maxed out from seven periods of school—the whole thing falls apart.
Most schools spend a couple weeks on coin counting in first or second grade, then never revisit it. Fifteen years ago, most kids got regular practice anyway: allowances in cash, buying candy at the corner store, counting change for the ice cream truck. Now? Most teens go their whole week without touching physical money. They tap a watch, scan a phone, send Venmo requests for pizza. If you don’t nail that skill when it’s taught in 2nd grade, there’s no natural do-over. Everyone around you just assumes you know how, so you learn to avoid situations where you have to do it, which means you never get low-stakes practice. Javi told me later he’d been faking it for years: he’d always let the cashier count out change for him, pretend he left his cash at home when his friends got tacos after practice, even lie and said he didn’t have time to work the homecoming ticket cash table for student council.
That weekend, we were cleaning out the back of his closet when we found the ceramic piggy bank his grandma gave him for his 7th birthday, stuffed full of coins he’d saved through elementary school. He was already hauling it toward the door to dump it at Coinstar, like he always does, when I said we could count it ourselves first. No timer, no line, no one watching. We dragged it to the kitchen table, ordered a pizza, and put on the college basketball highlights he’d been wanting to watch. No quiz, no formal lesson, just something to mess with while we waited for delivery.
The first trick his teacher suggested, that we tried right away, was to split every step apart instead of trying to do it all at once. Most people, me included, grab coins and add as they go, but that forces your brain to switch between sorting, identifying, and adding nonstop. We dumped all the coins out and sorted them first into four separate piles: quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies. No math, just sorting. That alone took most of the pressure off. Then we started with the highest value, like the old advice says, but instead of making him hold the running total in his head, I handed him a grocery receipt and a pen, and told him to write the total after every pile. He looked at me like I’d just suggested he bring a calculator to a spelling bee. “You’re allowed to do that?” he said. No one had ever told him. He thought counting coins was a test you had to pass all in your head, no aids allowed.
We counted the quarters first: 51 of them, that’s $12.75, he wrote that down. Then dimes: 94, that’s $9.40, added it on his phone calculator, wrote the new total. Then nickels, then pennies. We found three random half dollars in the bottom that neither of us had seen in years, and we just looked up their value on my phone, no big deal. All in, it took 22 minutes, and he only had to restart one count when the cat jumped up on the table and batted a pile of nickels across the floor. Total was $31.18. He didn’t make a big speech about feeling accomplished, but he rolled the coins himself and took them to the bank the next day, instead of paying the Coinstar fee.
I’ve had friends ask why we even bothered, honestly. Most places take digital payment, and there’s no shame in letting a machine count your change. It’s a fair question. But small, unspoken skills like this add up when you’re a teen. It’s not about being able to count a handful of change in two seconds. It’s about not panicking when the card machine goes down at the farmers market, or the parking meter only takes quarters, or you need to split a cash cover charge with friends at a show. It’s one less little thing to feel stupid about in front of people you want to impress.
His teacher also noted that occasional slowness is totally normal, especially for kids who rarely use cash, but if it stays consistently hard even with no pressure and simple shortcuts, it’s often tied to working memory gaps that come along with ADHD, dyscalculia, or other learning differences. It’s not a sign your kid is “bad at math”—Javi still pulls steady Bs in algebra 2, for reference—it’s just a specific gap that’s easy to miss when all high school math work is done on paper or a calculator. We added a line to his 504 plan last month that lets him use a calculator and written notes for any consumer math or personal finance work, no questions asked. It took a 15 minute meeting, no hoops.
We stopped at that same Kroger again last week, total came to $11.32. Javi had a five dollar bill, four ones, and a pocket full of change. Before I could offer to pay, he upended his pocket on the ledge again. He sorted the coins quick, scribbled the running total on the back of the receipt, and counted out exact change in 40 seconds flat. The woman behind us didn’t even look up from her phone. He didn’t say anything about it when we walked out, just tossed his protein bar in the back seat. He still uses Apple Pay 9 times out of 10, and he still says coins are a stupid, inconvenient way to pay for things. He’s not wrong.
Last weekend, he signed up for the first shift at the cross country team’s cash-only snack stand at home meets. I drove him there, and I saw him set four little paper cups on the table for each coin type, a tiny spiral notebook tucked next to the Gatorade cooler. He texted me a blurry photo of him flipping off the camera halfway through the shift, captioned only “only gave one kid an extra quarter, caught it in time.”
We still dump our loose change on the kitchen table every couple of weeks, sort it while we watch TV, no pressure, no quizzes. I don’t know if he’ll ever be the kind of person who can count a handful of coins without writing anything down. I don’t really care. He’s got a system that works for him, and he doesn’t avoid cash situations anymore. That’s enough, for now.
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