- The water contamination issue in West Virginia sounds terrible for those living in the area but it’s a gold mine for econ teachers! In addition to the obvious implications for teaching externalities and regulation, you could also use this Marketplace interview with the owner of a chain of grocery stores as a jumping-off point to talk about price controls and shortages, or demand for complements and substitutes.
- Mark Maier and I have set up a site and blog to accompany our book, The Data Game: Controversies in Social Science Statistics. In addition to a help page for instructors, we’ll be posting relevant links and examples from current events. If you teach any type of statistics course or other course that uses data, check it out!
- James Tierney’s site Teach Me Econ has some great ideas for teaching economics. He also does a podcast series about the economics classroom; the most recent is an interview with Eric Chiang, the author of the latest edition of the CoreEconomics textbook (and if you haven’t seen Eric’s Around the World in 80 Hours videos, they are pretty cool!)
As I mentioned in my last post , I am asking my Econ for Teachers students to reflect on their reading by responding to discussion prompts. It occurred to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to share my thoughts on those issues here and see if anyone wants to chime in. For this week, the students were asked to read the California and national content standards , an article by Mark Schug and others about why social science teachers dread teaching economics and how to overcome the dread, an article by William Walstad on the importance of economics for understanding the world around us and making better personal decisions (with some evidence on the dismal state of economic literacy in this country), and another article by Walstad on the status of economic education in high schools (full citations below). The reflection prompt asks the students to then answer the following questions: What was your high school econ experience like? What do you remember most from that class? How do...
Thanks for the shout out and thank you more for joining me today!
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