Few of today's teachers can remember an economic situation quite like the one everyone now faces. To find analogies for the collapse of the housing bubble and the subsequent credit crisis, one has to search not his or her memories but the textbooks. "The Great Gatsby" and "The Grapes of Wrath" suddenly make more sense now. Generations of students have groaned at the task of memorizing acronyms like FDIC or FNMA: now they seem to leap off the pages of the history books. What will happen next? Will the economy bounce back, or will a wave of foreclosures create an invisible "Dust Bowl," uprooting hundreds of thousands of people? And how do teachers teach in this environment? This article presents interviews with two experts--social critic Meizhu Lui and psychologist Melanie Killen--to help readers navigate these uncharted waters. Lui offers her take on where the crisis may lead people, and Killen talks about how to help students cope in a time when the economic news is grim.