Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

More food for thought about what we can realistically expect to accomplish in the classroom, from The Teaching Professor : ...every student there experienced that same day in different ways and all those ways were different from what we experienced. If you think about this too much, it can drive you crazy. So much of it is so out of our control. Teachers can control how well they prepare and that does help to ensure that things go well in class for more as opposed to fewer students. But teachers can’t control what students bring with them to any day in class—what’s happening in their personal lives, how well prepared they might be, what background experiences influence their reaction to this material, how ready they are to learn, whether they come to class with a headache or have an exam next period… There’s not much point worrying about what’s beyond our ability to control.... We might want to start saying, “Class went well for me today” and stop saying, “The students really learned a...

I sometimes think I must have some secret ability to attract information I'm thinking about. For example, I've been thinking a lot about what is realistic to expect in terms of what I can accomplish with my students, and then someone on Twitter directed me to this article in the Chronicle. The author's main point is that students today come to college with a completely different attitude about information, authority and the institution of academia. The article overall is worth a read but the part I particularly wanted to share comes about two-thirds in: "But we must be realistic about what good pedagogy can accomplish. It is not a panacea — it will not create a society of lovers of learning in which our social ills will finally be cured... Even the best teachers will not convert every student into a lifelong learner who embraces knowledge for its own sake. That is a commitment that must come from within; it is an intentional decision to swim against powerful cultur...

Next week, I'll be using this cartoon in a discussion of choices with my Principles class: It's from a website called Garfield Minus Garfield which the creator describes as: "... a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb." In other words, he takes Garfield out of the strip and gets something almost as funny as the original...

I had a troubling conversation with a junior colleague this afternoon. He will be teaching Intro Micro this spring for the first time and he came by to ask me how I usually assign grades; that is, whether I use the traditional cut-offs (95+=A, 90-95=A-, etc.), or if I curve, or use some other system. I said that I start with the traditional cut-offs and then curve up if my average is 'too low', which I deem anything below around 78%. If I do make any adjustments, it's generally to help students at the lower end of the distribution, rather than making sure there are a certain number of As, Bs, etc. But my department likes for us to keep our class averages in the C+ range (2.3-2.5-ish) so if my class average ends up "too high" then I won't curve at all. I don't know if other departments do this (try to make sure class averages fall in a certain range), but the way it was explained to me was that we don't want students to think that certain professors are...

I'm O.D.'ing on inaugural coverage but wanted to take a quick minute to highlight a couple quotes from Obama's speech. The talking heads keep saying that his speech didn't have any "Think not what your country can do for you" moments but there were a couple lines that I really hope people will keep repeating. One was "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works." Another was "Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control." These quotes will be the perfect introduction for the lecture where I start talking about market failure and the role of government in improving market outcomes. What a day!

Thinking about my resolution to stop trying to be perfect , I was browsing in the self-help section at Borders (yes, I'm perfectly willing to admit it). Like many academics, I seem to believe that the answers to any question must be in a book somewhere; it is just a matter of finding it. So I was looking for some advice about how to create more balance in my life. I can't remember the title of the book but at some point, I read a description of burnout that really resonated with me - the author basically described burnout as occurring when people have unrealistically high expectations of success. When those expectations are not met, they work harder but that just leads to more frustration and then disillusionment, loss of motivation, boredom. That pretty much describes me to a T right now. I've been killing myself over my classes for the last several months while feeling less and less enthusiastic about them. And since I'm usually a fairly positive person, I've bee...

It seems to be generally accepted among the administration at my University that large lecture classes are the most cost-effective way to serve increasing numbers of students with stagnant budgets. I can't necessarily disagree (putting aside questions of why we keep letting in more students if we aren't getting the funds to deal with them). But I've been thinking a lot lately about whether we distribute those large lecture classes across the curriculum in the most efficient way. By 'efficient', I mean in the sense of maximizing total educational 'output', given constraints. The norm is to use large lectures for introductory classes, which are presumably taught via lecture anyway, and reserve the 'small' classes for upper-division classes, which are presumably conducted with more discussion and interaction (e.g., seminars)*. In fields like history, I can imagine that is an accurate description of the way courses are taught. But in economics, I don...

[Via Marginal Revolution] Paul Kedrosky has Wordled the session titles and paper titles from the ASSA meetings : I'm thinking that this would be a great starting point for my "What is economics?" discussion in Principles.

"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank This post is going to have nothing to do with either teaching or economics because I broke the rule I created for myself last fall and I read my course evaluations without having something else already planned to immediately take my mind off of them (because while there were many very nice comments, I will naturally obsess over the many negative ones). So instead, I just want to share a story that re-affirms my belief that there are truly a lot of good people in this world. I just got back from a three-day trip to Reno with my extended family. Wednesday was a particularly good day as I got a huge bonus on the goldfish slot machine game (for anyone who hasn't been in a casino in a while, slot machines these days are a whole different animal than the old pull-the-arm-and-watch-the-reels-spin machines. Today's machines all have cool graphics and fun interactive 'bonus' ga...

One of my teaching mantras is: "teaching is an iterative process". I repeat this to myself whenever things go badly in a class (or entire course), reminding myself that at least I can fix it (or try to fix it) the next time around. While this helps to keep me from feeling too terrible when things go wrong, it would obviously be nice to avoid things going badly in the first place. This is one of the many reasons why it's so nice to have a community to turn to when trying out new things - it's way less stressful to learn from other people's mistakes than your own. I've been thinking about this a lot lately because my big project for this winter break is getting things put together for a writing-intensive class for econ majors that I'll be teaching in the spring semester. As with the Economics for Teachers course that I taught in the fall, this is an entirely new course for my department and, since I can't seem to do anything the easy way, it isn't q...

In a Freakonomics post this morning, Ian Ayres notes the high quality of the comments on that blog, but also some dismay at the harsh tone of some. In the comments to that post, Roy Huggins provides an important insight: "It seems that people in agreement are often silent when they need to be noisy." (note: one of the posts Ayres refers to is one in which he discusses gay marriage so it's not hard to imagine that some of the reaction was loud and negative). On this blog, I don't usually discuss topics that are particularly controversial and I haven't had any comments that I would describe as negative flames. But I have noticed that when reading other blogs, I am far more likely to comment on a post if I want to disagree, or add something that I think is missing, than if I just want to say, "I totally agree." Somehow, it feels like agreement doesn't add as much to the conversation as disagreement. And yet, personally, I love getting comments that le...

Teaching can be an oddly solitary endeavor. Although we are constantly interacting with our students, most of us are alone in doing all of the real work of teaching. Some may team-teach occasionally, but the majority of the time, teaching a class is not a collaborative effort. And in certain environments (i.e., institutions where research is valued a lot more than teaching), those of us who care about teaching may not even have many colleagues to talk with about teaching in general, let alone specific classes. That's one reason I was so excited about attending the pre-ASSA conference workshop last Friday. Aside from the topic of the meeting itself (which I will write about in an upcoming post), it was great simply to be able to put faces with names that I've seen on the tch-econ listserv emails, Journal of Economic Education articles and assorted teaching-econ-related books and papers. I wasn't able to attend the rest of the conference but I do hope to get at least a few...