It was a class period devoted to reviewing performance in a hypothetical stock market picking game. But for West Mifflin Area High School seniors in teacher Eric Woods' Thursday economics class, it might well have been a duck-and-cover drill.

"McDonald's dropped $10," groaned Devin Gloeckl, 17, lamenting the falling stock he thought would be a sure winner.

"It's not as bad as Apple," said 17-year-old Robert Brennan, giving Devin a few exaggerated pats on the shoulder.

Thursday marked the end of the class's first week playing the stock market game, in which teams of three compete with each other investing a fictional $100,000 in three different stocks. And as first weeks go, this one was not unlike learning to swim starting from 20,000 leagues under the sea.

"Thank God it's not real money," said Bryan Boyle, 17.

In the last few weeks, the country's economic crisis has worked its way into local classrooms of all varieties.

English classes in the Pine-Richland School District are studying the diction and rhetoric of U.S. and international politicians. East Allegheny Senior High School government classes are debating the merits of earmarks attached to emergency legislation.

"It's hard to take away class time to talk about it, but it's such a relevant issue," said Natalie Grattan, Baldwin High School's Advanced Placement economics teacher. "It's almost more important than the AP test."

Ms. Grattan, who has a master's degree in economics and worked in the business world prior to her teaching career, is regularly stopped in the hallways by students with questions about the economic downturn. She's even received current events questions from worried parents.

Thus far, she's been devoting the first few minutes of class most days to answering questions about current events, working with her class to come up with an ever-evolving summary of the economic crisis.

"It's something that no matter what the class is, social studies-wise, you really need to take time out and explain to the students and answer their questions," said Karl Geisler, a U.S. history teacher at Baldwin. "I mean, it's going to be in the history books."

In the West Mifflin economics class, students wondered exactly what this crisis would mean for them. Would their parents still have money to contribute toward college? Would colleges have to raise tuition?

"People are going to lose their jobs and that'll be scary for when we get out of college," said Chris Kaselonis, 17. "Even if you have a degree, you might not get a job."

And the seniors also wrestled with the same questions faced by their parents and anyone else who has engaged in the unpleasant task of checking their 401K statement recently.

With stocks in a free fall, what do you do?

Of the $100,000 Joseph Kinney and Shawn Grieg had invested, they'd lost $29,687 in just the first week. Then again, with Microsoft and two video game companies -- EA Games and Activision Blizzard -- their portfolio wasn't exactly diversified.

They decided to stick with their stock picks, convinced that the companies would rebound with new games released for the holiday season.

Lucy Grimes, whose team had seen big losses from Google and Microsoft stocks, also chose not to make any sudden moves.

"It'll go up," she said. "It'll come back."

Colin Kracinovsky, Jordan Dillard and Jessica Kostelnik, whose team had chosen Pfizer, Cisco Systems and GameStop, weren't so sure. At the end of the class period, they dumped all their Pfizer stock for Ultra Petroleum, one of the few companies they'd found that had shown a recent uptick.

Mr. Woods tried to put the current stock market in perspective, telling his students that gross domestic product and the unemployment rate were actually better economic indicators than the stock market. Even looking at the market as an indicator, he said, this is only one of 30 times since the turn of the century that the country's had a bear market.

"Take this as a learning experience," he said. "There are going to be fluctuations in the market. Investing in the stock market is a long-term investment."

Still, this wasn't the classroom of a few years ago, when teams made $20,000 in just a semester of stock picking. These students, if they were actually using real money, seemed more likely to hide it under their mattresses than to open a brokerage account.

"It's depressing," said Chris. "Once I get out of here, I don't want to invest in the stock market."

"We should have been like, 'We don't want to put our money in the stock market. We want a savings account,' " said Devin. "And we would have won."