Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

Hat tip to Steve Greenlaw for sharing this FABULOUS video:

Given that my last post mentioned how I let teaching prep consume whatever available time I have, I did something incredibly stupid (but I guess also incredibly collegial) earlier this week: I agreed to teach a new course next year. Because of budget cuts (which, by the way, seems to be the most-used phrase in the CSU community these days), my department will have almost no lecturers next year and the full-time faculty are going to have to step up and teach a bunch of classes that haven't been taught by full-timers in years. A side effect is that most of us are going to have to actually teach three sections, if not three preps. Although we technically have a 3-3 load, the majority of the tenured and tenure-track faculty in my department have had a de facto 2-2 for several years because any class that is larger than 120 students is treated as two of our three classes. But there are only a handful of classes that can be taught in the large sections so we are going to start rotating...

Last week, one of my friends from college (now a professor) posted an update on her Facebook that she "has not yet learned that teaching eats up all available time. well, I've learned that, just not learned how to control it...", to which I commented "Amen sister! If you figure out that control part, do let me know!" I thought of that again when reading an article on Inside Higher Ed that was giving advice to new faculty about aligning your time with your priorities. Specifically, if you're at an institution where you need to do research in order to get tenure, then your to-do list and time map should reflect that. This is not rocket science and certainly not news to any academic. But the challenge is HOW do you do that? I know that for me, unless I have a co-author breathing down my neck, or a specific external deadline coming up (like a conference), my time during the semester is invariably eaten up by teaching-related stuff. Some of it is unavoidable - I...

I mentioned last week that I will be having students in my upper-division writing class working together as 'co-authors'. But I'm still trying to figure out how to distribute points for each assignment. I want students to take their first drafts seriously so I feel like some part of their grade should depend on that first draft. On the other hand, I don't really want to grade the first draft the same way I would the final draft (mostly a time thing - I simply don't have the time to grade thirty papers in 48 hours with the care I would want), and I want students to take their revisions seriously as well. I've considered not assigning grades to the first draft at all and simply taking points off the assignment as a whole if they don't do a first draft, but I worry that then they won't take the first draft very seriously. Maybe that's OK, since they will have to do a revision anyway and the first draft at least makes them put their thoughts down, but s...

I started a post last night (about the fact that although classes have not yet begun, I'm already getting emails with annoying questions that suggest my students are either stupid or lazy) but I ended up deleting it because I decided it didn't really have a point; I was just complaining, and since I already spend far too much time doing that in real life, I probably don't need to do more of it online. So I had to laugh when I woke up this morning to a post on ProfHacker, titled These Kids Today: How Not to Talk About Undergrads , reminding me that the problem is not always them : I’m not saying that students, like proverbial customers, are always right, or that you *must* completely change your teaching to one particular style...But you do need to recognize that they can’t always be wrong–or, perhaps more precisely, if your fundamental assumption about them is that they’re unteachable, then that becomes self-fulfilling. Serendipitously, there was also a related article o...

The Teaching Professor points to an article that discusses how study strategies that work for learning math may be different than the study strategies that work in other subjects: ...the article has got me thinking that what this teacher has done would be such a useful exercise for all of us. What approaches do students use that aren’t effective in your field? ...my students loved flashcards, which work best in foreign language courses and maybe if you need to memorize definitions, but they are worthless when an exam requires the application of content. After identifying those strategies that don’t work, it is of course necessary to identify those that do, especially noting those that are unique to the kind of content we teach. The more specific we can be here the better. It’s not helpful enough to say that students need to practice. What kind of practice? For how long? And what do they do when they are practicing and make a mistake? I think the original article, by Justin Buchler,...

For those university instructors who were not able to participate in the AEA's Teaching Innovations Program , you will be happy to know that there is going to be a book that discusses how each of the modules worked and that provides lots of examples from individuals who did go through the program. There was a TIP Conference January 5-6, after the ASSA meetings in Atlanta, where all the contributors to the book presented the work that is going into their chapters (I'm one of the contributors for the chapter on large enrollment courses) and I have to say that it was the most invigorating 24 hours that I've spent at a conference in a long time. There were a couple of presentations that particularly inspired me and I'll be writing about them in more detail in future posts. Work is also being done on "TIP 2.0" which, from what I understand, will make the online modules available so people can work through them on their own. I'm not sure when that will be up and...

Last semester sort of sucked and I'm still trying to figure out why. And what I mean by 'it sucked' is that I felt like my students were more confused than in the past, more whiny than in the past, and I was often more frustrated than in the past (and I should say that I am referring entirely to my principles class - my upper-division Econ for Teachers class was fine). I think that part of it was a general issue of students (and faculty and staff) being affected by the budget cuts. I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for students to keep straight which classes were canceled because of furloughs on any given day. But I also wondered if part of the issue with the Principles class in particular was because I was teaching it as a Tuesday/Thursday class when I had previously taught it as a Monday/Wednesday/Friday class. Aside from the fact that I had to tweak all my materials to make lectures flow OK, I just think 75 minutes is a long time for students to be s...

One of the concepts that I think is hard for students to grasp because of the terminology is the concept of 'public goods'. Students know that certain goods and services are publicly-provided but have a hard time making the distinction between goods that are truly non-rival and non-excludable, and goods that the government has decided will be provided to everyone. Last semester, when I asked my students to identify a public service that is provided because of issues with non-rivalry and/or non-excludability, a large number used fire services, saying things like, "if your house is on fire, the fire department has to come put out the fire, they can't exclude individual houses." But this morning, I saw a news story that may help clarify this distinction. A municipality in San Diego county is considering charging for rescue services provided to non-residents who get into car accidents: "You would be charged if you were the cause of a traffic accident or are ...

Last spring, I taught a writing course for economics majors for the first time. As I gear up to teach it again, I am making a bunch of changes, particularly in how I structure the peer review process. Specifically, I am not calling it peer review or evaluation and instead, am going to try to get students to see themselves as 'co-authors' for their classmates. The big reason for this is that last year, I found that when asked to 'review' their classmates' work, the majority of students did not give very helpful feedback and when asked, they said that they did not feel qualified to critique someone else's work. I am hoping that by removing the idea of 'evaluating' or 'critiquing' from the process, and calling them 'co-authors' or 'teammates' instead, that students will start to think more along the lines of 'how would I make this better if I were writing it?' However, I don't really want every assignment to be a group...

Andrew Leigh points to a new study about class size at the university level that finds negative effects for classes over 100. This reminded me that one of my unfinished posts is a defense of large lectures - I may eventually post the whole thing but the core point is simply that all large classes are not created equal. Any study that tries to measure the impact of class size on some student outcome is going to be controlling for as many of the other things that affect that outcome as possible, like student and teacher characteristics (well, I should say, any well-designed study like the kind economists would want to see). But the reality is that when universities have discussions about increasing class sizes, ceteris is usually not paribus . So while I do believe that for any given instructor, students will likely be better off in smaller classes than larger, I also believe that a large lecture by one professor could easily be far better for students than a small lecture by another...

One problem I've always had with doing peer instruction using the CPS software from eInstruction is that you can either set it so that the answer distribution shows up immediately on the slide after the clicker question is closed, or not, and that applies for the entire session. There is no easy way for the instructor to see what the answer distribution is without also showing that distribution to the class. This means that if the answer distribution is mixed and I want to do peer instruction, students will also have seen the answer distribution and that can create issues with students assuming that whatever answer got the highest number of responses must be correct. At a recent workshop, I mentioned this issue and Mike Salemi suggested that I blank or freeze the projector before the answer distribution shows up; that way, I can see the distribution on the monitor at the podium but the students won't see it. I have no idea why that never occurred to me before but all I could...

I'm not going to say that one of my resolutions is to post more consistently or more often - I'd like to do both (or either) but I know that what always happens is that I get too busy and then I just feel guilty. But what I do resolve to do is at least to try to remember that the whole reason I started this blog was simply as an outlet for me to "think aloud" about my teaching. I think one thing that has stopped me from posting more often is that I've felt a need to 'craft' my posts, to flush out my thoughts into something coherent before sharing them here. The very process of writing often helps me with that flushing out, but there are a lot of times when I don't post stuff because it seems 'incomplete' - the number of unfinished posts I have is really pretty lame. So I've decided that I need to get over that and just use this blog as I originally wanted, as a sort of 'online journal' of thoughts about teaching. I certainly hope th...