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Showing posts from July, 2008

Economics vs. personal finance

Thanks to the Problogger Social Media Love-in , I have a number of new friends on Twitter and other socialnetworking sites (hello new friends!). As I've been exploring the blogs of all these new friends, I'm surprised by how many money-oriented and personal-finance-related blogs there are out there (yes, I realize that this is a sample selection issue since I'm sure that these folks are more likely than others to have been interested in connecting with an economist, but still...). Seeing all these blogs strikes me as particularly great given a recent Freakonomics post in which Dubner asks whether we are a nation of financial illiterates and the answer is a pretty scary yes. But I also have to say that the Freakonomics post raised an old issue for me about whether we should be teaching 'personal finance' in schools. In many places, high school economics courses already ARE courses more in personal finance than real economics. That is probably not so much a consciou

Class discussions about the war

There's a particularly timely post on Blogher about the cost of the Iraq war - and I say 'timely' because I was in the middle of thinking about how to talk about the war in my class when the post appeared in my reader. The post links to a calculator from Progressive Future that tells you how much of your 2007 taxes went to pay for the war and what that money could have bought in terms of days of health coverage, Head Start, renewable power or education for a veteran. The calculator highlights the dollar value of these alternatives but the post on Blogher also points out that it's hard to put a dollar figure on some of the other costs. That was going to be my point in talking about the war in class - I'm planning to use the war discussion to tie together cost-benefit analysis with the positive-normative distinction (i.e., how much you value certain costs, like the loss of American lives, versus the benefits, like increased safety, is really a normative assessment).

Dumping content

Even before reading the comments from the first time I taught the 500-seater micro principles class, I was working on re-designing the class to cover less material. But of course, that requires thinking hard about what to drop. I have particularly struggled with the balance between material that I think students may need for upper-division classes (like cost curves) and material that I think students may not see anywhere else if they don't actually become econ majors (like externalities and public goods). I tend to prefer keeping the latter and dumping the former, since I strongly believe in the liberal arts, general education aspect of economics. I'm not as concerned that some business majors might not have a stellar grasp on average versus marginal costs, as I am that they won't understand there are good reasons for government intervention in certain markets. So I was really intrigued by a conversation I had yesterday with a friend who teaches in an econ department that

More on fixed vs. growth mindset

This article from the New York Times Business section talks about how people with a 'growth' mindset (i.e., who believe talent is not fixed but can grow over time) are more innovative and successful in the corporate world. Given that the majority of students in my Principles class are wanna-be business majors, maybe I should have them read this... Related posts: Intrinsic vs. extrinsic incentives Cultivating optimism

Why do I read my evaluations?

[warning: this post doesn't really have a point, I just need to vent!] Sigh. Because I've been on leave since January, I never read my evaluations from Fall 2007, the first time that I taught the 500-seat Principles Micro course. But now I'm back in San Diego and was foolish enough to look at them. They aren't all bad - a number of my students are very sweet and made comments such as, "Professor Imazeki really did the best she could with a class this size," and "I don't think she needs to do anything to improve except not have so many slacker whiners in her class" (I may have to have that one framed to re-read every semester when I'm going through my evaluations!). Of course, there are the typical contradictions that I try to ignore (e.g., a bunch of students HATE Aplia and just as many LOVE it). There are also the perennial (for me) "she goes way too fast" and "her exams are crazy hard". I can accept those because I think

Helping students learn time management

Lifehack has a review of StudyRails , a web-based service that helps students manage their time and their studying. It costs $10 a month but for students who really need help with their time management skills (I'm particularly thinking of new college students), this looks like it could be a really useful service. I was particularly interested when I saw this post because I make it a point to tell students in my introductory courses that my objectives for the course include both subject knowledge and life skills - the first is econ-specific but the second is not. By 'life skills', I mean critical thinking (which I consider most important) but also the more mundane but clearly-important-for-success-in-life skills like teamwork, communication and time management. I began naming these skills as specific objectives for the course because I got tired of dealing with students who would turn in work that was incredibly poorly written but who would complain when I marked them down

Intrinsic vs. extrinsic incentives

Somewhat related to my struggle to trust my students is my interest in intrinsic versus extrinsic incentives. Economistmom wrote a post about handling her daughter's allowance, which led me to comment that when I was growing up, my mom always said that our allowances were not 'payment' for doing household chores, we were supposed to do chores simply because it was our responsibility as members of the family. Tyler Cowen makes a similar point in Discover Your Inner Economist , arguing that if you pay your kids to do stuff that it can actually be a weaker incentive than relying on their sense of familial duty. But on the other hand, the ed policy world was buzzing a few weeks ago when New York City received a prestigious award for its "Million" Campaign, in which students receive cell phones and prizes as rewards for academic achievement. On the face of it, I wasn't thrilled when I first heard about the Million Campaign, precisely because I'm skeptical th

Learning to trust students

I have many objections to super-large lecture sections (which, unfortunately, are my University’s response to higher student enrollments) but probably my biggest gripe is that they provide a huge disincentive to have students write. Even with masters-level teaching assistants, and even if papers are short, I don’t think any but the most masochistic professors would want to deal with grading for that many students. But one of the reasons that I have become so interested in Web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis is that they have the potential to get students writing, but without the need for me to monitor every word. So for my 500-seat Principles of Micro class this fall, I plan to give students the option to write blogs or participate in discussion boards. Given the size of the class, my thought is that I will give students a choice of four semester projects: one option will be volunteering for Junior Achievement, one involves participating in a class blog about economics around the web/in

Letters from America

Tim Harford has done the world a service by pointing out that Angus Deaton's Letters from America (published every six months in Britain's Royal Economic Society Newsletter) are online. Deaton's Letters provide many insightful observations about the economics profession, particularly when it intersects with policy and the media. Definitely worth perusing...

What we can learn from a high school student

Tyler Cowen points to a story about a student in Pittsburgh, Seth Weidman, who independently taught AP economics to his classmates . Aside from the obvious awesomeness of this kid's initiative, this story was striking to me for the important lessons it contains for all teachers of economics: - One of the keys to teaching economics well is making it relevant: "Seth developed a philosophy that if students weren't paying attention, it was because he wasn't making the class interesting enough. So he concocted ways to illustrate economic concepts from the real world ofhigh school. Eva remembered the time he explained the concept of a positive externality using an example of complimenting a girl in the hallway." - The best way to learn something is to teach it: "There's no doubt that it was a lot of work, said Seth, but it wasn't all altruistic: not only was it fun to teach the class, but he also gained a deeper understanding of economics. "If you can

Resisting change

As I was looking for more information about Clay Shirky , I found his Here Comes Everybody blog . A post from April contains a 'lightly edited transcription' of a speech in which Shirky mentions the resistance of many in the media world to the new Web 2.0 world: This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. When I read that, I immediately thought about how similar that sounds to much of the conversations in the teaching and learning community about the move toward more student-centered learning. Like traditional media folks, many teachers don't really understand this new world bec

Cultivating optimism

My sister, who works in human resources, was recently talking about some of the questions that she asks prospective employees. One of her favorite interview questions is, "Tell us about a mistake you've made and how you handled that." As she talked about the answers she had gotten from a few recent interviewees, I found myself wondering how I would answer that particular question. It seems obvious that the 'right' answer is NOT, "Hmmm, I can't think of any", and yet, I honestly couldn't think of any example I might relate in a job interview. I'm not saying I'm perfect - I decided that it's more that I have a way of 're-writing history' in my head. And then I saw an article at GreaterGood about raising optimistic kids and it explained my way of seeing the world much better than I had ever seen it articulated before (I apologize for a somewhat long quote but I think it's worth it): According to Seligman and other researcher

Here Comes the Economists

I just starting reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody - I happened to pick it up when browsing the New Books shelf at the library and had no idea it was the current 'it' book among techies . Of course, since then, I've seen a dozen references to it on as many blogs so now I'm feeling very cliché. But in this particular case, I think I'm OK with that, since I want to comment on a somewhat different aspect of the book than most of the ed and/or tech bloggers I've been reading. I'm only about forty pages into it but I was so struck by Shirky's use of economic concepts that I had to go look up whether he is an economist (he isn't but he clearly learned it somewhere). One of the book's basic premises is that the internet has reduced the transaction costs of organizing large groups of people - on page 30 he evens quotes Coase's original 1937 article on transaction costs. In one early passage where he talks about the implications for busi

Teaching teaching

I've been plugging away with prepping my Economics for Teachers course, trying to figure out what is most important to cover, the best sequence in which to present certain ideas, and generally getting completely side-tracked as I find great articles and websites addressing different aspects of teaching economics. Since this is an entirely new course, I don't have many of the usual tools for guiding my decisions; that is, when I have prepped other courses for the first time, I have always had the syllabi of others who had taught the course before, as well as textbooks, instructor manuals and other aids from publishers. But in this case, the only such help I have is William Becker's syllabus for a Teaching Economics to Undergraduates course aimed at econ grad students. That's certainly been helpful but only up to a point, since I'll be teaching undergrads who will someday be teaching high school students and who are, for the most part, not even econ majors. So basic