Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

As Director of the CTL, I have organized a series of events this year around the theme 'Teaching the Whole Student'. Each of the events focuses on a different aspect of student identity and how those identities may impact their experience in our classrooms. So far, we've had one on international students, LGBTQ+ students, and students in emotional distress; next up is military-affiliated students and in the spring, we're addressing first-gen students, bilingual students, microaggressions and sexual assault. Although I consider myself a pretty enlightened person, each of the events so far has taught me a lot and made me think a little harder about how different my own experience is/has been from many of my students. One thought that I keep coming back to is how many things about my everyday life that I take for granted, particularly things that I am able to say, do or feel (or not feel) that other people cannot. In other words, I keep thinking about my privilege. Tha...

As those who actually speak Japanese have told me, it really should be "Eee-mah-zeh-key" (equal emphasis) but it's definitely NOT 'Eye-ma-zeek-key', 'Ih-mask-ee' or (don't ask me why) 'Ihm-ski'. I'm not entirely sure why it's hard for people - in my mind, my name is actually pronounced pretty much how it looks but I think the proximity of a 'z' and 'k' throws people off. Interestingly, Spanish speakers tend to be the best at pronouncing it correctly because Japanese pronunciation of vowels is similar to Spanish. But my entire life, on the first day of a class with a new teacher (and sometimes even those I'd had before), they would start calling roll, and I would brace myself as they got closer to the I's. Many times, I could tell when they got to my name on the roster because after a Joe Holmes or Jane Howard, there would be that slight pause, at which point I'd usually just jump in and call out my name for...

Just got back from CTREE – many thanks to everyone who helped make it such a success! I had some great conversations, heard some super-interesting papers, and generally got re-invigorated, not just about teaching but about economics . Some random thoughts, just to get them out of my brain: In the first plenary, Susan Laury mentioned an ‘experiment’ she learned from Dirk Mateer to show gains from trade. She brings a bunch of random items to class and distributes them to a group of students and asks them to rate their happiness with the item. They then have the option to trade; once trading is complete, they again rate their happiness. Generally, total happiness should increase, showing the gains from trade alone. I just wanted to add that I do a similar activity that I got from Gail Hoyt but in that version, you make ‘tickets’ for a range of events (like concerts or sports events) and give those to the students, and I ask them to state their willingness to pay for the ticket the...

When I started this blog eight (OMG, has it really been EIGHT?!?) years ago, I didn't really have a plan - I just wanted to try out this blogging thing because I was thinking about having my students do it and figured that doing it myself would be the best way to learn how it all works. Over the years, I've largely used the blog to chronicle what I was doing in the classroom, mostly as a way of just reflecting and thinking about what was happening (I've always been a big journaler), but also with the thought that maybe by doing my thinking 'out loud', it might be helpful to someone, somewhere. Along the way, I feel like I've gotten to know many more economists who care about teaching and have felt part of a community that supports and reflects my own academic values, and I really can't express how awesome that has been! But now I feel like I'm at a bit of a crossroads. My position as Director of SDSU's Center for Teaching and Learning has led me i...

A recent commentary in the Chronicle suggests that " To Solve the Skills Gap in Hiring, Create Expectations in the Classroom ". The author notes that employers today report larger gaps in 'soft skills' like time management, work ethic, motivation and professionalism, than in technical skills; yet, the policies adopted by many college instructors do not do much to help students develop those necessary skills. The author refers to her own policies about expecting students to arrive to class and turn in work on time, not offering extra credit, etc. I think most instructors try to find an appropriate balance between holding students accountable for acting like adults, and understanding that sometimes, life happens. For what it's worth, I thought folks might be interested in how I handle this, at least in my upper-division writing course. In that course, I use a form of specification grading - it's not full-blown specs grading but students' grades are based ...

The SDSU Center for Teaching and Learning finally has a new website and I have to say hallelujah! It seems like a small thing but as someone who spends a lot of time on the Web, the old site was sooooo painful to deal with. But we've now moved to Wordpress so there's a blogging feature, which means I can tag stuff and people can actually find it, and there are cool plug-ins to deal with stuff like the events calendar and faculty profiles. Yeehaw! One of the challenges of moving to the new site is that I've been killing myself to get content on the site so there's actually something there worth looking at. Before we went live, I added a bunch of back-dated posts for old events, but I also am trying to create content that is actually useful for instructors who want to know more about some specific topic . Given the wealth of information that already exists, I'm mostly curating links from other places but also trying to highlight 'best practices' and provid...

I'm "teaching" a new "class" this semester - the quotes are because the "class" is a faculty seminar and it's really more like I'm 'facilitating' than 'teaching'. But the work I'm putting into it feels very much like prepping a course and I had forgotten how much work this is! The seminar is on "High-Impact Teaching", which is really just a term I made up, mostly to appeal to those in my administration who are all about High-Impact Practices, and which I am using to encompass scholarly teaching and using evidence-based pedagogy (if anyone is interested, the details are here ). Anyway, the first meeting was Thursday and in preparation, the participants were asked to complete the Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI) and the Teaching Goals Inventory (TGI). I thought I'd share these tools with you all because I think these are both really interesting tools for thinking about who you are as a teacher. The items...

Economists, that is. For the first time in a couple years, I attended the ASSAs, and for the first time in even more years, I interacted with some economists who are not involved with either ed policy (my research home) or teaching. Ugh, lesson learned. I had somehow forgotten that the majority of people in this discipline (or at least, the majority of those who go to the ASSAs) are white male blowhards who actually think all the math they make grad students do is useful (NOTE: I am totally not talking about YOU, awesome person who reads my blog - I am absolutely certain that no one who is a math-obsessed blowhard would find my blog remotely interesting :-)). I guess I should take it as reassuring that I managed to forget what the 'typical economist' is like; certainly 20 years ago, when I was in my grad program at Wisconsin, I was very, VERY aware of it. But ed policy is one of those applied micro fields that is pretty equally gender balanced (particularly at the Association...