Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

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.

I must be a masochist. I woke up yesterday morning and decided that I just couldn't NOT talk about the financial crisis in my classes. But since my own understanding of the crisis was pretty shallow, I proceeded to spend the next five hours reading everything I could find, bugging my colleagues and putting together a lecture for my Principles class at noon that tried to tie the crisis together with our recent discussions of cost-benefit analysis and incentives (if anyone is interested, the lecture is now on my iTunesU site - email me directly and I'm happy to send the link). I jumped forward in my syllabus and talked about moral hazard but I think it actually fit quite well with our previous discussions so I may even keep it there in the future. Of course, I have no idea what my students thought of my presentation but I'm glad I did it; this whole situation clearly has huge implications and even if most of my students aren't directly affected right now, they need to be ...

I am working on re-arranging my Principles class in order to discuss certain topics before November 4th. One of the big topics that I'm moving up is asymmetric information (of course, with the chaos of this week, I almost want to chuck my entire syllabus and just get straight to moral hazard this week, but since my stress level is already way higher than is healthy, I'll settle for getting to it in a couple weeks). My plan is to spend an entire day talking about health care and a new study of McCain's health care plan gives me plenty to talk about. To quote the abstract: Senator John McCain's (R-AZ) health plan would eliminate the current tax exclusion of employer payments for health coverage, replace the exclusion with a refundable tax credit for those who purchase coverage, and encourage Americans to move to a national market for nongroup insurance. Middle-range estimates suggest that initially this change will have little impact on the number of uninsured people, a...

The first thing I had students do in my Economics for Teachers course is look over California's content standards in economics (the California Council on Economic Education has a great booklet that pulls out the econ-specific standards for every grade), and compare them to the Voluntary National Content Standards in Economics . There were two reactions from my students I found particularly noteworthy. The first, which I sort of expected, was many commented that they did not learn this stuff in high school, although almost all of them went to high school in California after the standards were adopted. While they said that they did talk about some of the topics, most agreed that they didn't really see most of the content until they got to college. Of course, that is exactly what led me to create this class in the first place, but it was nice to have my perceived need for the class reinforced. The other reaction that I found interesting was that several students asked about the...

I am the first to admit that there are a lot of things going on with my Principles class - they've got clickers and Aplia to register for, plus podcasts, videocasts, Powerpoint slides and occasionally extra stuff to read, all posted on Blackboard. I get that there's a lot, I really do. That's why I have handouts that explain everything, why I explain things again in class, and when I get multiple emails from students with the same question, why I will email the whole class with my explanation (and post the text of that email on Blackboard, since some students don't get my emails even though I've told them to fix their accounts so they will). And yet, I know I will still get emails from students with questions I have already answered. At that point, is it terrible of me to be a bit annoyed/ bewildered? Of course, the supportive teacher in me feels compelled to answer every one of these emails, repeating the information one more time. But the crotchety adult in me c...

As a new teacher, one of the first things I learned was the value of shutting up. My own classroom style has always included asking a lot of questions, even fairly obvious ones, to make sure that students are with me. But if you're going to ask questions, you have to get comfortable with letting there be silence and just waiting for an answer. Most students will never answer if they think they don't have to so they sit and wait, either for someone else to answer or for the teacher to give up and move on. So I've gotten fairly used to waiting them out and it usually works. But today I re-discovered how uncomfortable silence can be. I don't know if it's a glitch in the new version of the clicker software or what, but after students have answered a question with their clickers, the computer takes quite a while to process the data and let me return to my regular slides. This happened to a lesser degree last year (and with 300-400 responses, I don't expect the system...

Well, I survived. And aside from the fact that my students are still having a lot of problems registering their clickers, it was mostly good (btw, if anyone out there is shopping for a personal response system, let me NOT recommend eInstruction, if for no other reason than I shudder to think how much worse their customer service would be if they had any more customers!). I always feel nervous on the first day of classes. I don't know how old I will be before the first day of the semester just feels like any other day, but I sort of hope that day never comes - as Jon Becker reassured me via Twitter, "the butterflies mean you care". Even though I felt a little sick to my stomach, I know that most of the butterflies were due to excited anticipation (I'd say only 10% was dread and fear :-)). But some semesters are worse than others and I know that I've been particularly nervous about this fall because a) I haven't been in the classroom for several months, b) both...

(Note:this post is primarily intended for my students but may be useful to anyone else who is relatively new to blogs) If you have spent any time on the web, you have probably seen this icon, which signifies an RSS feed. Subscribing to feeds means that you don't have to actually visit sites to get newly-published information; instead, the content is sent to you. For the Economics for Teachers class, in which every student will be publishing a blog, the easiest way to keep up with all the posts is through subscribing to the feeds. The following Common Craft video provides a simple explanation of how feeds work: The RSS feed for this blog is at the top of the right-hand sidebar. As the video points out, you will need a feedreader for collecting all your feeds. Google Reader is one of the more popular web-based readers and if you already have a gmail account, this is probably the easiest way to go. Bloglines is another web...