Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

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...