Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

I'm stressed out. Last week, I was having stomach pains and I swear, I'm worried I may have an ulcer. But when someone asks me WHY I'm so stressed, I'm not quite sure what to say. I just have this feeling of being overwhelmed, that I'm trying to juggle too many different balls and am constantly worried about dropping one. But at the same time, when I sit down and really look at everything I need to do (I am the queen of to-do lists!), I am pretty sure it is all under control. So why do I feel like it isn't? The only answer I can come up with is the meetings. Oh, the endless meetings! As a normal faculty member, pretty much the only set items on my calendar were my classes, my office hours and the occasional department meeting. But now, as CTL Director, my calendar is suddenly FULL of meetings and other scheduled events. Of course, there are the roughly weekly CTL events, but also biweekly meetings with Instructional Technology Services, biweekly meetings ...

Thank goodness for Spring Break! Between late February and end of March, I went to three different conferences (one in San Diego so I didn't have to travel anywhere, thank goodness) so I've spent all of this week just getting caught up... I learned so many cool things and my head has been swimming will too many ideas to manage but let me try to at least share a couple things with you all... At the CSU Symposium on University Teaching - where the conference theme was 'GRIT' - the pre-conference keynote was by Dr. Mary-Ann Winkelmes from UNLV's Transparency Project . The main gist was the importance of helping students understand how and why we ask them to do the things we ask them to do. The discussion was particularly interesting to me, given my last post about being more transparent in my writing class.  Jesse Vestermark, a librarian at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, gave a presentation on helping students critically evaluate online sources - also incredibly time...