Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

As a Californian and Japanese-American (fourth-generation in both cases), I'm very proud that my state now  officially recognizes today as Fred Korematsu Day . I realize that some may see the proliferation of specially-designated days like this as political correctness run amok, but unfortunately, it's clearly necessary - it's appalling how often I encounter people who know nothing about the Japanese-American internment . It's particularly scary given the current political climate where it seems like many in Washington believe "national security" should trump civil liberties. Brief History Lesson For those who don't know what I'm talking about, between 1941 and 1945, after the bombing of Pearl harbor, the United States government forcibly removed over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the Pacific coast and placed the majority in 10 "camps" in the western interior of the country (I put "camps" in quotes bec...

For the last three semesters, I've taught one or two sections of the Data Analysis course with 75 students in each section (yes, this is an upper-division course and yes, I think it's insane). I teach the class with team-based learning (which I realized I haven't written about much - will put that on the To Do list), so there is still a lot of class discussion; from my perspective, the main problem with having 150 students is how long it takes me to grade the exams and papers (yes, I give essay exams and assign two papers, though one of the papers is supposed to be only about four pages). When I originally decided to teach the class with TBL, it was partly because of the material, which lends itself quite well to the TBL format of having students work on complex application exercises. But it was also partly because I knew the classes would be so large and working in teams seemed like a good way to still have lots of student interaction and class discussion. However, thi...

Classes started here on Wednesday so I've been working hard the last couple weeks to re-vamp my syllabi while also trying to get at least a little bit of research work done. I'll be teaching the writing class again and instead of using SWoRD , I'm planning to have students do their peer reviews using Turnitin's PeerMark system. I used PeerMark in the fall with my Econ for Teachers class and while it doesn't have SWoRD's fancy algorithm for converting reviewing scores into grades, there are a lot of things about the interface that I like. I can still require that they give both numeric scores and qualitative comments, and I can grade those reviews plus the integration with Blackboard also means I have full control over when assignments become available, can set exact due dates and times, and can even set 'adaptive release' criteria (so, for example, I can require students to view a tutorial on giving good feedback before they can access their first set...

Now that you've seen what I said in Chicago, let me talk a little about the rest of the panel... First, I have to say that I was fairly anxious about it beforehand, largely because my blog is very different from the other blogs represented and I had no idea what the other panelists were going to say. I knew I was going to speak first and figured that either would be a very good thing or a very bad thing; I think it turned out to be good (I felt a bit bad for Jodi Beggs, who went last and had the tough job of trying not to repeat too much of what the other panelists said but I thought she did a very nice job with that). Of the other panelists, Jodi was probably the most concretely useful as she talked a bit about nuts and bolts things like using RSS readers to keep up with multiple blogs, as well as the pros and cons of using blogs in teaching economics. That balance ended up being particularly nice because Steve Levitt and Alex Tabarrok presented two very different sides of usi...

[The Chronicle article about the AEA session made it sound like I talked a lot about having students blog but it was really only the last few minutes of my presentation. I wasn't originally even going to talk about that at all (what I posted the other day  was all I originally planned to say) but Brad Delong had to cancel so I added more stuff. So here's what I had to say about students blogging...] I did want to take a few minutes to talk about an entirely different aspect of using blogs in the classroom and that is having students blog. I actually started blogging originally because I was considering having students blog for one of my classes and I figured the best way to learn how this blogging thing works was to do it myself. My perspective is that blogging can be a relatively easy way to get students to do more writing, which is something that has become increasing rare at my university since our classes keep getting bigger. Blogging typically isn’t something that you’...

[What follows is an edited version of the first two-thirds of my presentation for the AEA panel on "Using Blogs to Teach Undergraduate Economics" (the last third was about having students write blogs, which I'll be posting soon)] For those of you who are wondering who the heck I am, let me start by explaining that my blog is somewhat different from the other blogs up here in that I don't think of it as first and foremost an economics blog, I think of it as a teaching blog. That is, I generally write more about teaching issues, not economics issues, though the classes I happen to teach are economics classes. From my perspective, there are two types of blogs that are relevant to my teaching: economics blogs and academic blogs. When I say economics blogs, I mean blogs written by economists where the primary focus is discussion of economic concepts and/or commentary on economic issues, such as the other blogs represented on this panel today. As an economics instructo...

Just wanted to extend a quick hello to anyone who has found their way here because of the  session  about blogging at the ASSA meetings, or the Chronicle article about that session! The " New to the blog? Start here " page will give you an overview of the blog and point you to some posts you might be interested in. You can also subscribe to receive future posts via  RSS , Facebook or Twitter  using the links on the right-hand side of the page, or via email by entering your address in the box. Thanks for reading!