Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

The other day I described the image I have in my head of the perfect professor . Realistically, I know that such a person doesn't really exist, at least not all in one body. But somewhere, deep down, I think I believe that such a person could be real; more disturbingly, I've realized that some part of me believes I should be able to become such a professor. I began thinking about this when I found myself getting all worked up about a series of emails I got from a particular student at the end of the semester. There was nothing particularly surprising about these emails - the student was upset to have received a B+ when he felt he 'deserved' an A. Of course he had to tell me that this is the ONLY class in which he got less than an A, and pointed out that based on his performance on exams, he clearly knows the material (he did have very high scores on his exams). But he was missing a couple of assignments and had missed enough classes (i.e., had clicker scores of zero)...

In addition to all the sessions during the conference itself, there is a pre-conference roundtable discussion/workshop on Adapting Pedagogical Innovations Across Disciplines. It's on Friday, January 2, from 3:00-5:00 pm in the San Francisco Hilton. I'm not sure if it is still possible to sign up but here is all the info: ================================================================= Pre-ASSA Roundtable Discussion/Workshop Adapting Pedagogical Innovations Across Disciplines At this year's ASSA meeting in San Francisco (Januray 3-5,2009) we will be hosting a pre-meeting Roundtable Discussion/Workshop exploring pedagogical innovations developed in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines and their adaptability in economics. In particular, we will focus on pedagogical innovations developed from physics education research such as context-rich problems, just-in-time teaching, interactive lecture demonstrations, and concept tests/peer instruction. Our obj...

For anyone going to the ASSA meetings in San Francisco: I've been going through the program , looking for the teaching-related sessions. All of these sessions are in the Hilton San Francisco but the online program doesn't have room locations so these are just the times and papers. Saturday, 8:00AM: Training and Assessing the Effectiveness of Teaching Assistants in Economics Presiding: KENNETH G. ELZINGA, University of Virginia WILLIAM WALSTAD, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and WILLIAM E. BECKER, Indiana University--Preparing Graduate Students in Economics for Teaching: Survey Findings and Recommendations ADA JANSEN and PETRONELLA HORN, Stellenbosch University, Matieland--Are Female and Postgraduate Teaching Assistants More Effective? An Investigation of How the Gender and Experience of Teaching Assistants Affect Students' Performance JAMES MCCOY and MARTIN MILKMAN, Murray State University--Do Recent Ph.D. Economists Feel Prepared to Teach Economics? SARAH HASTEDT, Unive...

I've been thinking about an image I have in my head of the "perfect professor". This perfect professor inspires all her students, leading them to think critically and become lifelong learners. Her lectures are always so clear and interesting that students never fall asleep, read newspapers, surf the web or text their friends in class (except to comment on something class-related, of course). The perfect professor's students are never grade-grubbers because she has inspired them to want to learn for learning's sake. She manages to convey how much she cares about her students without giving them the impression that she is a pushover. The perfect professor never gets emails from students complaining that her grading is unfair because her students never get confused about deadlines and/or they understand the exact repercussions of missed assignments. Her classes are challenging, but not impossible, in that way that even the B and C students feel like they are learning...

Good stuff . My favorite bit: The best scholars maintain an open-mindedness and humility about even their own core beliefs. Excessive conviction is often a sign of insufficient thought, which in turn may be derived from a certain pig-headedness. Intellectual maturity comes when you can maintain the right balance between informed belief and honest skepticism.

One of my New Year's resolutions is to post here on a more regular schedule (which will probably last until the spring semester starts!) so I'm working on a bunch of topics for January. But in the meantime, I wanted to wish everyone happy holidays and point you to two holiday round-up posts from Economix : Christmas Economics Hanukkah Economics And this one has nothing to do with economics but is too funny (at least to anyone who is on Twitter ) not to share: The Christmas Story, as told through Twitter Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Kwanzaa and Festivus Maximus to all!

Lisa of Lisa's (Online) Teaching Blog has put her finger on something that has been bugging me for the last several weeks: After years of being accommodating to students, and providing flexibility to deal with their hectic schedules, and alternative assignments to cater to learning styles, we’ve done it. We’ve helped create an entire generation of students who assume alternatives for everything, and expect us to accommodate everything. They also comfortably assume that every instruction, limitation, restriction applied to their coursework will be repeated to them many times in a variety of formats, and are, at any rate, negotiable if they didn’t get it the first four times... Enabling, that’s what they call it. I really don’t like to be harsh, but I can’t imagine them negotiating every deadline (most don’t even bother to negotiate it — they just skip it and hand it to me later) and requiring instructions be repeated four times in the working world. I hope they grow up to be highl...

One of the first lessons I learned as a teacher was the importance of setting student expectations early, making it clear from day one what students can expect from your class in terms of workload, schedule, learning outcomes, etc., and then being consistent. Students may not be happy about everything but my experience is that they will accept a lot as long as it isn't unexpected. Unfortunately, I didn't do so well with that this semester. For various reasons, I found myself making changes mid-semester and I know that many of the emails I'm dealing with now are because of that inconsistency. There are certain changes I think are justified and I don't think there's anything wrong with making mid-semester adjustments when something I'm doing isn't working for a majority of students (like adding the online quizzes ). But what's bumming me out is that some of the changes I've needed to make are things I should have anticipated. For example, at the beginn...

I've spent a lot of time this week writing exams. I give my Principles students three midterms, with the third one falling on the next-to-last class (which would be this coming Wednesday). Then I use the last class meeting to review everything from the semester in preparation for the cumulative final; in other words, I try to remind them of everything they've learned, which I hate to say, usually ends up being sort of a laundry list of concepts. I'm still working on a better way to review "everything"... I know that many of my students hate my exams - I suppose that they would say I try to "trick" them. That's because for many questions, I purposely try to make one of the wrong answers something that will seem right to students who only have a superficial understanding of the material. I talk to a lot of students who do worse on my exams than they thought and when they see the correct answers, they say, "Oh, that's the other answer I was thi...

As a microeconomist, I don't spend much time talking to my students about price indices but once a year, I wish I did. That's because I always get such a geeky kick out of the Christmas Price Index , PNC's annual update of the cost to actually buy all the items in the song 12 Days of Christmas . The "cost of Christmas" is up 8.1% this year, to over $21,000 (driven again by the cost of swans-a-swimming). What I hadn't realized is that PNC's website also has some cool tools for teachers , including a Pin the Price Tag on the Gift game and and an Economics Trivia quiz. Definitely worth checking out...

I hate the word 'smart'. To most economists, it is probably considered the highest compliment you can give/get, but whenever I hear an economist say that someone is really 'smart', I have to stop myself from rolling my eyes. This is because, in many cases, the person being admired is considered smart because they are great at doing complicated math or abstract theory. However, that same person may may be completely devoid of common sense, social skills, or any ability to communicate with 'regular' (i.e., non-economist) people. As an academic, it's simply ridiculous how often I hear the word 'smart' used in this one-dimensional way. It is used to describe students, other academics, politicians, random people one happened to meet at a party, you name it, and it's always intended in a highly complimentary way. But for reasons I have never understood, it almost always means only one kind of smart - the kind of smart that gets good grades and can tal...

In Economics for Teachers, I finally got around to teaching some macro. As a microeconomist through and through, I must admit I haven't exactly been looking forward to this part of the semester - it's not that I don't find macro kind of interesting (especially these days), but I haven't taught it in a very long time. I'm pretty sure I bored the heck out of my class for most of Monday and Wednesday but the one bright spot was using a clip from Mary Poppins to motivate our discussion of the banking system. I used the scene that includes the song "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank" in which the Chairman of the Bank, and Mr. Banks, try to explain to the children that by investing Michael's tuppence, he can be part of "railways through Africa; dams across the Nile; fleets of ocean greyhounds; majestic, self-amortizing canals; plantations of ripening tea". In the end, Michael causes a run on the bank when he starts yelling 'give me back my money' to...

[The following is an email I received yesterday from a dear friend from college. Adam lives in Los Angeles with his family and I asked if I could post his email because he expresses so well what is in my own heart but does it far more eloquently than I could.] Dear Friends and Family, Aman and I awoke this morning with unfortunately heavy hearts. We found ourselves unable to fully enjoy or celebrate Barack Obama's historic win, because of the heartbreaking passage of Proposition 8, which enshrined discrimination against gays and lesbians into our California constitution. We found ourselves thinking of our two beautiful children and of our own marriage, which 45 years ago would not have been possible in much of the country because of very similar ignorance and fear. Proponents of Proposition 8 do not like it when parallels are drawn between same-sex marriage and interracial marriage. But the similarities are too overwhelmingly obvious to be ignored. Forty-five years ago, in much of ...

Please vote! If you aren't sure where to go, Google makes it easy: go to http://maps.google.com/vote and enter your address. I'm actually a permanent mail-in voter but I'm taking my ballot to a polling place today so I can get an "I voted" sticker to put on my Obama pin!

[This is the email I sent to my students today, with my solution to the attendance problem I wrote about last week . Coincidentally, InsideHigherEd has an article today on clickers that summarizes some of the issues with using them.] Dear students, As I mentioned on Friday, I have been considering how to re-structure the points for the clicker questions. The failure of the clickers this past Wednesday, the number of people who left at that point, and the relative quiet of the ensuing class, made me realize that by attaching points to clicker questions, I may have been doing you all a disservice. I don't want anyone to feel that they "have" to come to class just to get points. Obviously, I would hope that my lectures are sufficiently engaging and useful that you would see the benefit of attendance but I have always believed in treating my students as adults and as we discussed at length at the beginning of the semester, everything in life is a choice, including coming to ...

Freakonomics has a Q&A with Sean Masaki Flynn , author of Economics for Dummies . The whole thing is interesting but I thought his response to a question about "why is economics considered more of a real science than psychology?" was one of the best explanations of this issue that I've seen. It's a long quote but I think worth repeating: The most important philosopher of science of the 20th century, Karl Popper , argued that economics was the only social science that had turned into a real science. To him, economics was the queen of the social sciences just as physics was the king of the physical sciences. But why did he think this? Because economics was, to him, the only social science that engaged in systematically testing hypotheses about how the world works. Doing so is actually much easier if you engage in a lot of mathematical modeling. Why? Because in a math model it is crystal clear what your assumptions are, and also what implications follow from those a...

I know there have been some debates in the edublogosphere lately about political statements in/around the classroom. Personally, I don't think schools should tell teachers (whether K-12 or higher ed) that they can't wear political pins or have campaign bumper stickers or whatever. At the same time, I take my Obama pin off my bookbag when I'm at school, not because I think faculty shouldn't be allowed to wear such things, but because I don't want it to affect how my students perceive what I'm saying in the classroom. I talk about public policy a lot in all my classes but since I try to hew closely to positive (vs. normative) analysis of any issue, my students usually cannot tell what political party I belong to. I consider this A Good Thing. Perhaps my students are not as cynical as I am but as soon as I know what a person's political beliefs are, it affects how I perceive what they say about policy issues, particularly if I do not agree with them. That is, ...

For some reason, I wasn't able to use the clickers yesterday. CPS for PowerPoint seemed to be working but when I started the slideshow, I got an error I'd never seen before. Since it didn't go away when I closed and re-started the application, I decided to just get on with the lecture. But I did announce that the clickers weren't working and if anyone wanted to leave (since I knew that some students would), to please leave now so as not to disturb everyone else later. Well, quite a few more students left than I expected (seriously, about one quarter to one third). There were still probably about 250 students who stayed but it's amazing how empty a 500-seat classroom feels when it's only half full! But what was really striking was how wonderfully quiet the rest of the class was! With over 400 students, there is always a lot of chatter around the room - I try not to let it get too bad but there's only so much I can do so there's always a low-level buzz i...

Here's my problem with having students do evaluations: I tend to put more weight than I probably should on the negative comments students make. Over 300 students responded to my online evaluation; of those, 120 made comments; of those, about 70 were critical (while the others said they think the class is going well), and of those, probably only 40 were truly critical (with the others more along the lines of "I'd prefer X but I do like Y"). So I've got less than 10% of the class actively being critical (about the same as being actively complimentary), and a not-small proportion of the critical comments overall are the sorts of things you would expect from relatively immature freshmen and sophomores - my favorites are the "you try to trick us with questions where there's more than one right answer" and "you should do X" where X is something I already do (provide study guides, give them questions from last year's exam, etc.) but for whatev...

In a post a few weeks ago, about some of the assumptions around the financial crisis , I wondered what proportion of foreclosures and mortgage defaults are homeowners who honestly got screwed by greedy brokers and bankers, versus informed buyers who knowingly took risks and simply lost that gamble. I wasn't even really thinking about outright fraud but a recent post on Citizen Economists certainly has me thinking about it now. It's a fascinating post about the increase in mortgage and foreclosure fraud , including a very nice explanation of exactly how such fraud can be perpetrated. In the comments, SteveP claims to have reviewed hundreds of foreclosures in Florida and Georgia and found that over 70% were fraud scenarios. I'd like to see more rigorous and comprehensive analysis but thought this anecdotal data was certainly interesting.

It's Week 8 of our 15-week semester (yes, I keep track, though that's largely because my syllabus is laid out by week), so we're halfway through and this is usually around the time when I ask my students to do a mid-semester evaluation. This year, I'm a bit hesitant because honestly, I don't have the time or energy to make any real changes and my patience has already been stretched so thin by student demands that I'm loath to invite them to tell me what they think is wrong with the class. But I do think it's worth taking some time to reflect on how the semester is going. In my Principles class, my main concern is that the pace of the class is too slow, that we are not "covering" as much material as we should. I'm sort of having a hard time assessing this because I switched around the order in which I'm presenting topics so things are a bit jumbled up. Judging from the responses to clicker questions, students seem to be grasping the materia...

I think that for many people, the idea of teaching young children about money feels a bit odd. I can understand that, because at first glance, I think that's how I would feel and I'm an economist saying this! Unfortunately, a lot of people associate money with greed, selfishness and other "bad" values that we generally don't want to pass on to our children. But money itself, and the role it plays in the world, carries none of those values inherently; all of those negative associations arise from people spending money in particular ways. One thing I find interesting is that there are also plenty of values that most people consider "good" that could also be associated with spending money in other ways (such as 'frugal', 'generous', 'good provider') but I don't think that's the first thing that comes to most people's minds. At any rate, however you feel about money, I think most people would agree that those who have a be...

Awhile back, Freakonomics posted a bleg from an econ grad student looking for jokes to impress his professor. Although I had heard many of them before, this one had me laughing out loud (which either tells you something about me, about economists, or about how punchy I can be after teaching): A therapist, a priest and an economist go golfing. The group ahead of them is extremely slow, leading to some frustration among the three. Their complaints are overheard, and a man from the group ahead walks over to them. He introduces himself as an aide because the group of golfers he is with is blind! The aide thanks the three in appreciation for their patience for the blind golfers. The priest goes, “Oh no, all my life I’ve preached for all to be better to my fellow man and here I am complaining about the blind!”. The therapist says, “I’ve been trained my whole life to help others and here I am complaining about the blind, shame on me!” The economist says, “Oh no! They should be playing at nigh...

The way that most intro classes present the concepts of positive and normative is to say that normative statements are about the way the world "should" be while positive statements are about the way the world "is". I don't really like this because it's too narrow and students aren't able to see the bigger picture - if a sentence doesn't happen to contain the words "should" or "is", they get confused. So instead, I talk about normative statements as being based on values and opinion while positive statements can be empirically proven or disproven (they don't have to be true, you just have to be able to prove that they are true or not). I find that this gets them thinking beyond just whether a sentence is descriptive or prescriptive, and into actual analysis. So on the first midterm for my Principles class, I gave my students several sentences that they were supposed to identify as being either positive or normative. The one tha...

I have to serve up the requisite post about Paul Krugman being awarded the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (note that there isn't technically a 'Nobel Prize' in economics - it was established after the others). The award might surprise many non-economists who only know Krugman for his somewhat liberal op-ed column in the New York Times but politics aside, Krugman is widely known in the profession for his work on 'new trade theory'. I'm not a macro person so my grasp on his work is somewhat dim but The Financial Times sums it up nicely: Earlier trade theories suggested that a country would trade with partners that were different – rich would trade with poor, and capital-intensive would trade with labour-intensive. In practice, rich countries tend to trade with other rich countries. Mr Krugman’s analysis showed why this was to be expected: many products were most efficiently produced by large companies, but consumers wanted variety and would...

U. of Tennessee Student Indicted for Hacking Palin's E-Mail Account (Chronicle.com) Did they have to mention he's an econ major?

I can't remember when I first found Marshall Jevons ' (a.k.a. William Breit and Kenneth Elzinga) detective stories but as a budding economist, I got a huge kick out of the very thought of using economic analysis to solve a murder mystery. For those not familiar with these books, the protagonist is Henry Spearman, a professor of economics at Harvard who solves murder cases by applying economic reasoning. Even if you don't have the slightest interest in economics, they are fun and easy to read, which is part of what makes them such great tools for exposing students to economic thinking. They really make the point that thinking like an economist is about so much more than just money and markets. Which is why I was excited to see that Ms.Y at Osborne High School in Marietta, Georgia wants to have her AP Econ students read Jevons' first book, Murder at the Margin . This is one of the projects I'm promoting for the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge and Ms. Y seems like th...

This started out as a quick response to Jim's comment on a previous post but it started getting long and I decided I'd just make it a full post (and to give fair warning, it's quite a big longer than usual). First, a mini-econ lesson for anyone who hasn't taken econ in a while: "moral hazard" arises when people do not face the full costs or benefits of their actions and end up acting in disagreeable ways (that is, disagreeable to the people who DO face the full costs). The most common example is when people do not face the full costs of risky action (like because of insurance) and thus take more risks than they otherwise would. As I stress to my students, the name notwithstanding, moral hazard does not necessarily mean people are acting unethically (though it may) - it does mean they are responding to the incentives they face. The other important thing to know is that economists typically do not attach judgment when they see people acting in self-interested w...

One upside to the financial crisis is that it's generating some very funny bits. A few of my favorites: - Japanese Banking : In the last 7 hours Origami Bank has folded, Sumo Bank has gone belly up and Bonsai Bank announced plans to cut some of its branches. Yesterday, it was announced that Karaoke Bank is up for sale and will likely go for a song, while today shares in Kamikaze Bank were suspended after they nose-dived. Samurai Bank is soldiering on following sharp cutbacks and Ninja Bank is reported to have taken a hit, but they remain in the black. Furthermore, 500 staff at Karate Bank got the chop and analysts report that there is something fishy going on at Sushi Bank where it is feared that staff may get a raw deal. Shinto bank doesn’t have a prayer and it’s probably goodbye to Sayonara Banking too. - PhD Comics Economics Meltdown - Investment tips for 2008 (via email): With all the turmoil in the market today and the collapse of Lehman Bros and acquisition of Merrill Lynch ...

This is a great site for teachers. The author, Jake, creates charts and graphs of various economic data - or as the tagline says, "Darn nice economic eye candy". There's always the usual economic indicators but also random data related to current events. The amount of commentary or explanation varies a lot but there is a post this week that I thought was a really excellent, very simple explanation of how the Bailout Can Work and At No Cost to Taxpayers .

As someone who does research on school finance, particularly in California, I am all too aware that many of our public schools are seriously under-funded (I say 'many', not all, because there are also quite a few that are just fine, thanks to inequities in the way schools are financed, but that's a whole other discussion). While my research focuses on the systemic funding, I've always been most heart-broken by the stories about the impact on individual classrooms. We've all heard horror stories about teachers buying school supplies with their own money simply to make sure their students have basic items like paper and pencils. But even in situations where the school and students are relatively well-off, teachers will often reach into their own pockets in order to buy little things that can vastly improve their teaching - to use a simple example of my own, just last week I bought a bunch of candy to use for a classroom exercise on gains from trade and allocation of r...

No, I'm not talking about the bailout debacle (though this might be the only remotely-econ-related blog that isn't talking about that today; if you're looking for info on the financial crisis, I highly recommend Mark Thoma's Economist's View ). No, I'm just talking about teaching. I've been feeling sort of burned out and seriously in need of a vacation but today, in particular, was one of those days where I really didn't feel like getting out of bed, let alone getting in front of a classroom. I was crabby from the moment I got to campus and had to wait for my plain ol' coffee at the Starbucks in the student union (why do they even bother having an extra carafe set up if they wait until BOTH are empty before brewing more?). I was even crabbier after my principles class where, while going over the exam they took on Friday, I realized that I had once again given them a bad question (at least this time, the question itself made sense; I just had inadver...

Alex Tabarrok highlights this story about a Nebraska 'safe haven' law. Such laws are generally intended to protect babies from being abandoned but apparently, Nebraska's law does not specify an age limit. The headline says it all: Father leaves nine children at Nebraska hospital .

Monday's Principles class was one of those 'growing' experiences that I know make me a better teacher but aren't all that fun when you're in them. I asked what I thought was a fairly straightforward review clicker question about unintended consequences. Here's the question: Which of the following is an example of the unintended consequences of people responding to incentives? A.Feeling sick after over-eating. B.Sleeping through an exam because you were up all night studying. C.Using a bigger font because your teacher says your paper must be at least ten pages long. D.Paying taxes when you win the lottery. For any non-economist readers, let me explain that when economists refer to the 'unintended consequences of people responding to incentives', we are referring to the idea that people always respond to incentives (changes in costs or benefits) but their response may not be what was intended by the person setting the incentives. So the correct answer here...

I'm still letting classes swamp my time but wanted to share a couple quotes I found thought-provoking: From Free Exchange , economist.com: "I find it condescending to presume that when a banker over-leverages himself he is being greedy and reckless, but when the average person buys a house they can not afford, they were misled and are the victim." From Don Pedro, Economists for Obama : "[Treasury Secretary Paulson is] the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, and as Yglesias points out , he'll be unemployed in just 4 months time and presumably looking for a new job with a Wall Street company. How could Congress possibly give him $700,000,000,000 to buy bad debt of his choice from companies that will include his former and probably also his very-soon-in-the-future employers?" And this is unrelated to the crisis but I just thought it was really cool: Project Implicit assesses whether your sub-conscious mind is in agreement with your conscious mind.