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...