Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

Seriously, it was a weird semester (or 'is', since it isn't technically over yet). On the very bright side, my upper-division writing class was wonderful - I think this was the first time in thirteen years of teaching that every student in a class completed every major assignment (I'll ignore a handful of minor, not-paper assignments but even those had a 95% completion rate). There were some that were a few days late but there are no ZEROs for papers in my gradebook. I don't know if that was because I scared the heck out of the students on the first day, warning them about the amount of work in the class (one of my students commented in his end-of-course evaluation that on the first day, he thought, "Wow, this lady is INTENSE"), or it was because many of the assignments required that student swap papers with someone else and they didn't want to let down their peers, or if this was simply a particularly responsible group of students. Given that I also h...

For those who don't know me personally, and haven't figured it out from my name, I am a Japanese-American woman. I'm closer to forty than to thirty but because of my genes, I look a lot younger than I am. So it's not uncommon, when people find out what I do, for the response to be something along the lines of, "Gee, you look more like a student than a professor!" It took me a long time to not be offended by this. I realize that most people consider it a compliment, that they are saying I look much younger than they now realize I must be, but no matter how many times I hear it, it's hard not to think that they are saying something about more than just my youthful looks. It feels like they are saying that I'm somehow not a "real" professor because I just don't look the part. And of course, when these comments come from students, I immediately worry that if they think I don't look like a professor, then they won't treat me like a p...

I wrote a little while ago about how I don't actually like group work . But a recent post from the Teaching Professor made me think twice about how I 'privilege' working independently: We were discussing small groups and what to do with those students who resist participating in groups. They’re those independent learners who participate in group activities reluctantly and almost always prefer to do it alone. Should we excuse them from group work when they want to go it alone? There were points made on both sides. If they don’t learn well in social contexts, then why should we place them in situations that compromise what they’re going to learn? But group work is expected in so many professional contexts. Aren’t we doing students a disservice if we don’t help them develop the skills they’ll need to function effectively in groups? Then Professor Betsy Mudler made an interesting observation—something I’d never thought of before. We are concerned about whether we sh...