Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

Since the presidential campaign began, there have been references to 'Professor Obama', often said sarcastically or in a way that suggests that this is not a compliment. I won't go on a tirade about those who seem to think it's a bad thing for politicians to be smart and well-informed about the actual substance of public policy issues. I just wanted to point out that there are many times when the way Obama talks to Congress reminds me of the way I talk to my students but it's more about style than substance. I don't mean this as an insult (nor do I mean to compare my rhetorical abilities to Obama's!); it's more just an observation about how we choose to deal with an audience that doesn't want to be there. As a teacher, I'm usually talking to people (students) who may or may not actually want to be sitting there listening to me, and who may or may not be remotely interested in what I have to say, but they are somewhat compelled to be there and l...

I've decided to follow Derek's advice and set up a Facebook fan page for my Principles class. I figure it can't hurt to give students the option and I'm on Facebook a lot anyway so it's easy for me. While I was at it, I set up a Facebook page for this blog - I often come across news stories or other links that I think would be cool for teaching economics but I don't necessarily want to blog about and I figured a Facebook page would be a good way to post those. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out what the direct-link URL is (apparently, you need 25 fans before you can get a user-friendly URL but I can't even figure out what URL to use until then - if someone knows, please drop me a line!) but if you're on Facebook, you can search for Economics for Teachers in the box at the top of the screen and become a fan of the page that way. I'd love it if people want to post additional links or make comments there!

In my last post , I mentioned that one of my writing students referred to the specification checks in the article we read as the authors 'making excuses'. Along similar lines, another student was in my office yesterday and mentioned that he didn't like the article we read very much because he thought it was really arrogant of the author to refer to his own earlier work. I tried to explain that this is actually quite common, that most economists write several papers on related subjects because good research can often raise as many new questions as it answers, which leads to new papers. In this particular case, the author (Dan Hammermesh) had done earlier work establishing an empirical link between beauty and wages, and then this paper was looking more closely at what might explain that connection. So citing the earlier work was part of establishing the relevance of this paper. Again, it was just sort of fascinating to me how my students interpret things so differently beca...

In my writing class, one of the assignments is for students to read an academic journal article and write a non-technical summary; the prompt has them as analysts at the Fed, writing a summary for a quarterly newsletter that will be read by economists and others trained in economics but simply too busy to read the original article. I assign them the articles (one is Donohue and Levitt's article on abortion and crime and the other is a Journal of Economic Perspectives article on the college gender gap and neither is super-technical) but before they write their summaries, we analyze a different article together as a class. For that exercise, I use Hamermesh and Parker's Economics of Education Review article on beauty and teaching evaluations. The article works well because a) it's a subject the students can personally relate to, b) the paper itself is not all that technical, and c) the structure follows a very standard structure for empirical economics papers and is well-...

For the last couple semesters, I've dropped the discussion of production costs from my principles class - I've felt like I didn't have time and most students who aren't going to take additional economics classes really don't need to sit through the derivation of all the cost curves. So I just go through an intuitive explanation of why the supply curve is upward-sloping and leave it at that. But this semester, I decided to at least go through the derivation of the supply curve as the marginal cost curve because I think it will help students to make a stronger connection between supply and the firm's costs. Plus, decreasing marginal product/increasing marginal cost is one of the few concepts that I can teach with an in-class demonstration and I've missed doing that. In my smaller classes, and in the old days of chalkboards, I would have students 'grow rice' on the board. I don't remember where I first saw that activity but students write the word...

I am incredibly direct. Most of the time, I don't think I'm rude (anymore - I admit I've had to work hard to learn how to be more diplomatic); I simply have a hard time not saying what I'm thinking. And there are times when I forget that, as a teacher, this is not a good thing. I'm pretty sure I've never been publicly rude to a student but in class last night, I reacted without thinking to something a student said and the more I've thought about it, the more I feel stupid about it. I wasn't actually reacting to the student himself; he used a term that I haven't heard in a while, that he had obviously learned in another economics class, and I was thrown off because a) it took me a second to figure out what he was talking about and b) when I realized what he meant, it told me something about the way one of my colleagues must teach a particular course. I laughed, then realized that the student might think I was laughing at him, so I felt like I needed ...

I'm contemplating using Google Buzz as a way to broadcast announcements and stuff to my classes. At one point I was thinking about using Twitter for that but not very many students are actually on Twitter. I've also thought about setting up a Facebook page, at least for the 500-seater, but when I've surveyed students about that option, the response has been pretty lukewarm. I already tell students to use my gmail address (since my official school email account seems to get way too much spam), and I know that a lot of them have gmail accounts themselves. I use Facebook to connect with people I'm actually friends with, and Twitter for connecting with random bloggers and other online acquaintances (though I haven't been tweeting much lately at all), and I kind of like the idea of having a separate way to communicate with students. I just don't know if any of my students would actually want that. I guess I can give them the option and see how it works...

At least, that's what it feels like sometimes. First there are all the students in my writing class that can't seem to read the assignment instructions I give them so they get all confused and make life more difficult for themselves (seriously - I cannot figure out what is so hard to understand about "Go to this website (with URL) and click on the link at the bottom of the page; download the data you find there and make a graph" but two students went and got data from random other places). Then today, I gave my first exam in my principles class and I don't know if it's test anxiety or laziness or what, but over and over again, students would come up and ask me about some question and because they were asking something that was obvious in the question itself, I just literally read the question out loud to them, at which point they would say, "OH! I get it now!" and I would think to myself, "You do?!?" One of my TAs suggested that they were ...

As a student, I was not a big fan of collaborative or group work when I was in college. I rarely saw the benefit and usually ended up feeling like I had to do a lot more work, since I would want to make sure that what my group did was as good as if I had just done it myself. Free-riders were annoying (since I was usually the only trying to keep my group organized and on-track) but just as bad, if not worse, were people who simply didn't do very good work. Then I'd have to figure out a way to make whatever we turned in better but without hurting their feelings (I was, um, not very diplomatic when I was younger). As a teacher, I still don't love group work and I only use it when I think there are large benefits that cannot be achieved any other way. For example, I have several assignments in my writing class where students work in pairs or teams of four, but I believe that this is necessary because they need to see that in the 'real world', writing is not usually th...

One of my tasks for this week is to write the first midterm for my principles class. Writing exams is one of the few things that I find actually gets harder the longer I've taught the class, since I have to come up with new questions each time. One thing that helps is that I now have my students write questions at the end of each semester and that always yields at least a few that I can use the following semester. And I often start with old questions and just change the market and re-arrange the answers (bikes instead of cars, demand up instead of down, etc.). That can be challenging in and of itself because I try to think of real markets (not widgets!) that students will have some familiarity with but that haven't already been mentioned a hundred times, either by me, in class, or in their textbook or on Aplia - e.g., if anyone has ideas for realistic goods other than tobacco and gasoline to use for questions about inelastic demand or taxes, please let me know! But in addi...

It's Monday so to start your week off with some laughter... I didn't post anything about the Keynes/Hayek rap video from EconStories because I sort of figured that any economist with internet access must have already seen/heard about it somewhere else but in case you haven't, it's certainly worth watching.  Stand-up economist Yoram Bauman has a new book out, The Cartoon Introduction to Economics. For those, like me, who weren't in Atlanta for the AEA humor session, you can see Merle Hazard here , and Jodi Beggs here . Levitt and Dubner are expanding the Freakonomics world with a podcast . 

Last week, ProfHacker asked ' how do you handle add/drop? ' and I meant to leave a comment but then got busy. When I went back to look at how others responded, I had to laugh at Courtney's comment , which starts out, "Add/drop makes me extremely grumpy." I agree completely. In my 500-seater, I've been giving out add codes to anyone who asks because the class was severely under-enrolled (I started the semester with only 297 registered) and my department as a whole is under-target for our FTEs. I warn students that they can't make up any assignments they've missed (though I drop a few clicker scores at the end of the semester so as long as they don't miss anymore, it won't really matter) but although I think what I cover in the first few weeks is the most important stuff we do all semester (since it's really hammering home the core principles), the reality is that if students miss these first few weeks, it's probably not that big a deal. ...

Today was one of those days where my students seemed confused but I wasn't quite sure why. This time, it wasn't confusion about content (which by now, I can usually figure out); it was confusion about an assignment. In my writing class, the students had to write short data summary reports, the first drafts of which were due today. I paired them up with a classmate ('co-author') and in class, they were to read their teammate's paper, following some guidelines designed to help them assess the writing (e.g., 'can you generate a one-sentence summary of the report?', 'circle any terms that a non-economist might need defined', etc.) and discuss how to improve each report. Then for Wednesday, they must each independently revise both papers, that is, their own and that of their partner (each student wrote on a slightly different topic, though all were related to employment in some way). In class on Wednesday, they will then compare the two versions of each ...