Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

I must be a complete glutton for punishment but I think I want to completely re-arrange the schedule for my Principles class. Yes, classes start next week and yes, I probably am crazy! But while listening to Barack Obama speak last night*, it occurred to me that although I plan to talk about two of the topics that are going to be front-and-center during the election - namely, how our income tax system works and the asymmetric information problems that are crucial for understanding health care - I won't get to them until AFTER November 4th (for non-economist readers, these are both topics that tend to be on the 'optional' list for what to cover in an intro micro class so they are often tacked on at the end of the term, if at all). It seems to me that I should move them up much earlier in the semester so we can use these tools to analyze the candidates' proposals. I spend the first four weeks of the semester talking about the core principles of economics, including oppor...

Classes start next week. I opened up my Blackboard courses on Tuesday (i.e., made them accessible to students), which means some of the students in my Econ for Teachers course are likely to show up here (welcome!) since there's a link on the Blackboard site. Everything is pretty much done (well, except for all the stuff that's not) and at this point, I'm just hoping I haven't overlooked anything major. I'm trying so many new things and in the weeks ahead, I'm sure I'll have lots to think about as I evaluate the good, the bad and the ugly. One of the new things is the letter I sent to my Principles students. I may have some issues with Blackboard as a 'learning' management system but I have to say, the ability to send email to 500 students, before classes even start, is pretty useful. My objective with the email was to get a jump on some of the more frequently-asked questions I get about buying course materials, and to make sure that students really ...

(This is the email I sent to my Principles students, all 500 of them, this week) Welcome to Economics 102, Principles of Microeconomics! I’m looking forward to seeing you all in class next Wednesday and hope that we will have a productive semester together. There are just a couple things I wanted you to know/think about before our first class meeting. The course website on Blackboard is now available and I encourage you to take a look around; in particular, please look over the syllabus before our first meeting (it is posted under “Course Information”). We will discuss the syllabus in class but I will not have copies so feel free to get it off the website and bring it with you. If you are not familiar with Blackboard, go to https://blackboard.sdsu.edu/ to log in. Your username should be your Red ID and your password is your University PIN (i.e., the same information you use for WebPortal). If you do not know your Red ID number or you want to change your University PIN, contact SDSU e-...

Just read this interview with Dave Crenshaw, the author of The Myth of Multitasking: How "Doing It All" Gets Nothing Done . I haven't read it but apparently, the book makes a distinction between 'background tasking' where you are doing things that do not really require your full attention (like listening to music while you work or exercise) and 'switchtasking' which involves doing things where you must actually shift your attention from one thing to another. Crenshaw's point is that switchtasking actually reduces your productivity, since you are constantly interrupting your flow. His comments really resonated with me as I've been thinking a lot about multi-tasking lately, both in relation to my own life and in my classroom. As I've gotten more involved in social networks like Twitter and Facebook, not to mention having a growing number of blogs in my feed reader, I seem to have dramatically increased the possible distractions. I'm actually...

In addition to worrying that my students will be confused by all the technology and social media that I've incorporated into my classes, I've also been wondering about something that apparently is being called the " Creepy Treehouse " effect. This refers to students perceiving the use of certain social media tools as encroaching on their personal space. I don't think this necessarily applies to things like clickers, which students see as being pretty much entirely 'school-related', but it's definitely a concern for sites like Facebook, where students are using it already for socializing. In an informal survey of my students last spring, only a few had interacted with any of their courses through Facebook (including informal study groups or Blackboard's sync application). Furthermore, about half said that they would rather keep social networks separate from schoolwork. On the other hand, almost as many students said they wouldn't mind using Fac...

As I've been working on bringing more Web 2.0 tools into my classes, I have frequently wondered how much is too much? I know that my students are supposedly 'digital natives' but I also know that they are not all as cutting-edge tech savvy as we old fogies sometimes assume. For my intro Principles class, students have to maneuver Blackboard (including using discussion boards), Aplia (a private third-party website that provides online problems and experiments for econ classes), an online textbook available through Aplia, clickers , PowerPoint slides and podcasts. In addition, I'm very likely going to be participating in a pilot program to capture my lectures so those will be on iTunes U as well (though students will certainly not be required to watch them - they will just be available as an extra resource). I'm also thinking about using Twitter as an option for students to get reminders and to ask questions in class (also not required but just an extra resource) but ...

I'm not a big user of instant messaging. I have accounts on Skype and GoogleTalk but I just don't use them very much. It's partly a network thing (relatively few of my friends are IM users) and it's partly an inertia thing (I'm very attached to my email). But I think that mostly, it's a workflow thing: when I do get IMs, I feel compelled to respond right away (and then wait for an immediate reply back) but a lot of time, I don't want to interrupt what I'm doing. With email, it feels much more OK if my response isn't immediate, and it allows me to choose who I reply to and when. Being more active on Twitter has both reduced and increased my concerns. It's taught me that not all messages require a reply (other than perhaps an acknowledgement), and it's gotten me in the habit of having a messaging app open all the time and ignoring a lot of the notifications (I use Tweetdeck so I can see when there are new tweets from certain groups, or @replies...

Over on The Volokh Conspiracy , Eugene asks if anyone knows of a service or site that will help him automate student appointments . Ideally, students could go to the site, see the available time slots, put in their names and be done. Since this is something that I would be very interested in doing myself, I was curious to see what suggestions he got. A couple commenters suggested Google Calendar (if you 'share' the calendar with all your students) but unless I'm missing something, that would require putting in the emails of all your students individually and that seems like a pain (at least for me - my smallest class is still 40 students). Another commenter recommends Jiffle.com, which looks promising but still requires some email back-and-forth. It occurred to me that a wiki might work - you'd have to create the calendar yourself but then students could go in and fill in their names and even if someone tried to 'erase' someone else's name from a time slot,...

One of my reasons for starting this blog was to get some experience with blogging before the fall, when I will be having some of my students blog. Originally, I had been thinking of incorporating blogs into my 500-seater but I have decided to hold off on that until I've seen how it works in a smaller class first (students in the big class will contribute to discussion boards on Blackboard instead, which will allow me to track their posts and comments more easily than just free-for-all blogs). However, my upper-division Economics for Teachers class, which will hopefully be no more than 40 students, will be required to set up blogs. I will also encourage them to read and comment on this blog - I am not sure whether their presence will affect what I choose to write but that will be an experiment too. Over the next few weeks, I will be posting a few entries specifically for my students so to everyone else, please bear with me (or maybe they'll be helpful to you too!). I'd cert...

I loved this title of a recent post at Get Rich Slowly : If Personal Finance is Easy, Why Isn’t Everybody Rich? The post talks about the fact that getting rich is about more than just knowing what to do - it's just as much, if not more, about whether you are emotionally and mentally able to do what you know you need to do: Human beings are complex creatures. Some of us are highly logical. Some of us are emotional. Most of us fall someplace in between. We rarely make decisions based on optimal paths; more often, we choose what makes us happy in the short term . I’m not saying that this is the right thing to do — it’s just what happens. For those who routinely make financial decisions based on emotion, it can be difficult to turn things around. This is why I believe it is much more important for high school students to be well-trained in economics, before we start worrying about their knowledge of personal finance . Economics puts human behavior front and center, pointing out over a...

Today I want to put on my 'ed policy researcher' hat, because really, what's the fun of having a blog if you can't get political once in a while? An editorial in today's Sacramento Bee advocates for SB 890 (Scott), a bill that would create "college opportunity zones" in school districts with high proportions of low-income students. The idea is middle-school students pledge to take appropriate coursework, graduate from high school, file for financial aid and enroll in college. If they keep their pledge and continue to show financial need, the state guarantees them a community college fee waiver (under an existing, but under-utilized, program). The cost to administer the Opportunity Zones is fairly small and will be incurred mostly by the Department of Ed who have said they are happy to absorb it into their current budget. The cost of the actual fee waivers will depend on how many students are eligible but could potentially be large, and that is why the bil...

I thought this was an appropriate follow-up to yesterday's post : I recently found From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Learning , a wonderful blog from Liz Kolb that offers all kinds of ideas on how to use cell phones as a teaching tool. I can definitely see that the next evolution in my classroom technology adventure could be from clickers to cell phones and Liz's blog is an incredible resource. However, I will admit that personally, I'm not quite there yet. I don't object to the idea in general, my concern is purely about accessibility. Even though cell phones certainly seem ubiquitous, I still worry about assuming that every student has one and/or requiring them to use minutes or text messages that may cost them additional money. I do think that within a few years, this won't be a big deal, but I'm not convinced that we are quite there yet (actually, now that I think about it, I could use clickers to poll my students about this in the fall!). But even if I don...

A couple articles about 'clickers' on InsideHigherEd have evoked some strong responses ( here and here ). Among the comments, there seem to be three strands: those that love them, those that hate them, and those that think they are a useful tool but recognize that they are just a tool. Since I'm in the last category, I particularly liked a comment from Peg Wherry: Good teaching is good teaching, regardless of class size or tools available. But some tools let you do different things or even the same things in more productive ways. Certainly, part of the push-back on clickers is because some administrators want to use clickers (and other technology) as an excuse for increasing class sizes. That is, there are some who would like to believe that the reduction in educational quality created by forcing students into huge lectures can be offset by using these tools to foster greater interaction. To a certain extent, I actually agree - I definitely think that if you are going to t...

From The Economist : Economics is not like foreign languages (also, and more regrettably, in decline in secondary schools): there is no particular reason to learn it young, when time could perhaps be better spent acquiring general mathematical skills. When even The Economist gets it so terribly wrong, I feel like just giving up...

This is sort of old news by now but the TIAA-CREF Institute released a study a few weeks ago that reports the results of a survey of new professors (within the first five years on the job). The answers that seemed to get the most attention were those about how prepared these individuals felt (or didn't feel) coming out of grad school; for example, the Chronicle highlights the finding that only about 30 percent of respondents felt their graduate educations effectively prepared them to teach undergrads or conduct research and only about 10 percent felt prepared for other job responsibilities like advising or committee work. Inside Higher Ed points out the confidence gap between men and women but also reports some of the differences in how much time men and women spend on household responsibilities. Since I've already written about how I think professors are not trained as teachers , I won't add to that chorus again now. Instead, I wanted to point out one thing I saw in the...