Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

In my last post , I highlighted four criteria one might use to consider what projects and roles to take on. I posted a link to that on my personal Facebook page, with the summary comment, "Realizing that maybe what is missing from my work is fun. Next step is figuring out why and how to get more of it..." A friend pointed out that "If everyone declined things missing the fun element, every RTP committee would be empty, as would most governance" and she is absolutely right. So let me clarify that I don't need  everything  I do to be fun, and certainly not all the time, as long as at least one of the other criteria are satisfied (i.e., I feel I'm growing, or it's something I feel passionately about, or it gives me a sense of accomplishment). At the same time, if I don't feel like anything  I'm doing is particularly "fun", then that's a problem too. And what I've realized is that while my work with the CTL generally provides a se...

My first sabbatical was in 2006-07, right after I got tenure. I took the full year and moved back to the Bay Area for a year, feeling like I really needed to get completely away from everything about my life in San Diego, in order to think more clearly about what I really wanted. I did a ton of soul-searching that year. I remember feeling really conflicted. At that point, I had spent eleven years basically working toward one goal - tenure - and I'm not sure that I had ever really stopped to think about what would happen after that. For the first time in my academic life, I could actually step back and ask, "What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Is this what I want to keep doing for, potentially, the rest of my life? If not, what do I want to be doing instead? And is San Diego State where I want to do it for, potentially, the rest of my life? " Big questions. I can't say that I figured it all out but by the end of the year, I think I had identified the goals and value...

In my last post , I wrote about my resistance to calling myself a leader and how I think I've figured out where that resistance comes from: 1) it feels like bragging, 2) I don't fit the mental image I hold of what a leader looks like (i.e., white male), and 3) I don't want the responsibility I associate with being a leader. So the next questions I'm asking myself are: Does it really matter if I claim the leader label? And if it does, how do I get past this resistance I feel? Some of the conversations I had with colleagues earlier this week are helping me see that yes, it does matter, and what's particularly interesting to me is that I think some of the reasons why it matters are actually going to help me get over the resistance. For starters, a big reason I think it matters if I call myself a leader, and that also definitely makes it easier to do so, is that those first two sources of resistance are essentially founded on sexist and racist beliefs, and that's...

This week I participated in a Faculty Leadership Institute at school that has my brain kind of spinning. There are many things I want to write about but I am particularly grappling with the title questions right now. Basically, I know that I am "doing leadership" - for most of my life, I have always done work that others would call leadership, like I was in student government in high school and college, I always held leadership positions in other student organizations, I've been on Boards of professional associations, I've chaired committees, etc. And currently, I'm not only the CTL Director but a University Senator and the chair of one of the more "powerful" Senate committees. And I know I'm pretty darn effective at all that work. But a few years ago, when a colleague first referred to me as a 'faculty leader', I had an almost visceral negative reaction and immediately wanted to disagree with him. And in the last couple weeks, I have been ...

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...

The other day I was having a conversation with a friend, who is not an academic, about the tenure and promotion process. We have a mutual friend who is going up for full professor and she's at the stage where her department is sending out the requests for letters. My non-academic friend was asking about the process and he made a comment about how stressful it must be given that, at this point, there really isn't anything one can do to influence those letters. I said that was kind of the point, that in order to become a full professor, one needs to have been consistently productive and building a reputation as a contributor in one's field. But lately, I've been thinking a lot about the costs of this process. In order to build that reputation, we all specialize, sometimes in pretty small niches. Of course, as an economist, I generally believe specialization is a good thing but when one has wide-ranging interests, becoming 'stuck' in a specialization can become ...

Ah, it is finally summer! It's been a long, stressful school year and I am really looking forward to having some time to just breathe. One of the things I am really, REALLY looking forward to is having the opportunity to step back and think about my overall plan, both for the CTL and for my life in general (i.e., research and having a life outside school!). I feel like I spent most of this year just trying to keep things afloat while simultaneously figuring out what the hell I'm doing; that, in and of itself, has caused a lot of stress for me. My usual M.O. is to be much more methodical - I plan, I make lists, I develop clear goals before figuring out all the steps I need to take to reach those goals. While some people love to just jump in the car and drive aimlessly, seeing where they end up, I have always been a person who cannot enjoy the journey if I don't know what the destination is. It's OK if the destination changes as things happen along the way, but I'm ju...

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 ...

In honor of National Unmarried and Single Americans Week , I’m going to pose a question that may be somewhat controversial: Is there an economic rationale for government incentives to get married? By ‘government incentives to get married’, I’m talking about all the ways in which the government (and society in general) privileges married people. Of course, this is something that the gay community has been yelling about for a long time but I think many straight people don’t really, fully grasp the extent of the issue.* One widely-cited statistic is that there are over 1000 benefits, rights and protections in Federal laws that are based on marital status. Some of these benefits can still be obtained by the unmarried, with additional work (e.g., I can manually change the beneficiary for my retirement accounts or sign an advanced health directive so my partner can make medical decisions for me) but many are simply not available to unmarried people, period. It’s no wonder that single-sex co...

Today is the first official day of my sabbatical – woohoo! Of course, one could argue that my sabbatical really began when the spring semester ended but today is the first official day of the fall semester at school so it’s the first day I don’t “have” to be on campus when I otherwise would. Whenever I tell non-academics about my sabbatical, I feel a little guilty. I know that a lot of my non-academic friends don’t really understand why academics like me even get sabbaticals. After all, it’s not like I’m in archeology or art history or some other discipline where people obviously need the time away from teaching in order to go do field work. I’m not even leaving town this time around. I usually just explain that even if I can get some research done while teaching, I can get a whole lot more done when I have bigger chunks of uninterrupted time. But I think the main reason I feel guilty is because I know that for me, sabbatical is not really about getting work done (although work WI...

Some folks may have noticed that my posting is pretty sporadic. I was just looking at my stats and when I first started this blog (can’t believe it’s been five years!), I posted roughly every few days during the first year. Then it slowed down to about once a week. For the last several months, it’s been closer to once every few weeks, and some of those have been more public service announcements than me really writing about anything I’m personally doing with my teaching. This pattern is partly a reflection of what’s been happening with my classes – one reason I started this blog was as a place to ‘think aloud’ about what I was doing with some courses that were new to me and I was trying all kinds of random stuff, so it’s probably natural that over time, as I’ve honed what I’m doing, I haven’t felt the same need to write about them. It’s also a reflection of what’s been happening with me emotionally with regard to teaching – I’m definitely feeling burnt out. There is a reason that teac...

The other night, Joey and I were walking to our favorite neighborhood brewpub for dinner. I saw what looked like a twenty dollar bill on the ground and I swear to God, my first thought was, "That can't actually be a twenty." I'm not sure I would have actually kept walking if I were alone but Joey did not even hesitate - he pointed at the money, said, "whoa!", and picked up what turned out to be TWO twenties. Honestly, I still couldn't quite believe they were just lying there, like maybe they were counterfeit, or someone had planted them and was just waiting to see what we would do. I had to explain the joke to Joey (who is a computer engineer) and he just said, "Well, good thing I'm not an economist, isn't it?" Amen to that...

I submitted final grades on Monday. About four hours later (my current record is ten minutes), the emails began. Some of the requests are legitimate; e.g., I hit the wrong key when entering grades in the online system so someone got a D+ who should have had a C+ (I'm sure that over the years, I've made similar errors in the other direction but funny how I never hear from those students!). Some of the requests are benign; e.g., students miscalculate what their final weighted average is so they think they have a higher grade than they received. Those are just time-consuming because I have to look up their actual score, and also use the spreadsheet I posted online for them to use to verify that they just made a mistake somewhere, but once I respond, I typically don't hear from them again. And then there are the real whiners who do not understand why they received the grade they did and have a sob story about why they 'need' a higher grade. These are the emails that...

Well, I managed to go the entire five weeks of the Blendkit course (and then some) without actually blogging about it (or about anything else for that matter). For awhile I was mired in mid-semester grading (I thought I was being so smart the way I spread out exams and papers but instead, as soon as I finished one stack, there was another one coming in), and then, well, life happened. I'll try to catch up with the blended stuff eventually... One of the things that has been distracting me is putting together my 'teaching portfolio'. My chair would like to nominate me for a teaching award, which is very cool, but I need to put together a teaching portfolio that he can submit with his nomination. Although I have a statement about my teaching that I wrote for my tenure and promotion reviews, this portfolio needs to be much more extensive. Specifically, the guidelines for the award say it should include "such items as: recommendation letter(s), summaries of student evalu...

Classes start tomorrow and I'm feeling oddly anxious. For some reason, I seem to be having a particularly hard time getting mentally into 'school mode' - I've been saying for the last week that it just doesn't feel like it's time to start classes yet. I think my problem is that we are starting a full week before Labor Day; the last few years, I think we started on Wednesday or Thursday so I had to be on campus for advising and such for a few days at the beginning of the week before starting classes and could get mentally prepared. Although I was on campus a few days last week, it just doesn't feel the same... I'm always a little bit nervous for my first classes of the semester, though the nerves generally go away as soon as I start talking. I remember feeling like I was almost going to throw up before walking into the 500-seater the first time. It helps when I already know students in the class; last spring, about two-thirds of my writing class were s...

Every once in a while, one of the list-servs I'm on will get messages from people who want to be removed from the list (and apparently don't know how to look for the instructions about how to do so). This morning, there were several on the TBL list-serv and one person added the explanatory note "too many emails, too little time". While I understand the feeling, I also sort of don't. I mean, how many emails do academics really get? I know that compared to my friends who work in the private sector, I really don't get a lot, and I certainly don't get a lot that require immediate attention. That doesn't mean I don't read/answer my emails pretty darn quickly, but rarely do I need to respond as quickly as I do. However, I do know that when I see there is something in my inbox, I have a tendency to want to drop whatever I'm doing and see what that message is. So I've set up a system where I don't immediately see a lot of the emails that ...

When I was a kid, I was a voracious reader. I don't just mean that I read a lot of books but once I started reading a book, I hated to put it down until I had read the last page. When my mom would tell me to set the table for dinner, I'd say, "One more chapter" and then keep reading until she literally took the book out of my hands. I still remember reading Gone with the Wind in one weekend, most of it spent spread out on the living room floor, stopping only when my mom insisted I join the family to eat. This habit wasn't always so good for my sleeping patterns (there were way too many nights I stayed up til 3 in the morning to finish a book!) but I do have many, many happy memories associated with books from my childhood and I firmly believe that my love of reading is one of the big reasons I always did so well in school. So it sort of broke my heart to read this post by Mark Anderson, a fifth-grade teacher in the Bronx who won a contest for $450 to spend on ...

In discussing incentives or cost-benefit analysis, any good Principles textbook will mention that not all costs and benefits are monetary, and a whole lot of the behavioral economics field is built around the fact that people respond to incentives other than money.  But we economists (and an awful lot of non-economists) still seem to have a strong tendency to only count those costs and benefits that we can, well, count. Case in point: I recently installed solar panels on my house and as I was researching options, a big focus of everything I read was whether going solar would be 'cost-effective'. But what 'cost-effective' generally seemed to mean was that the monthly payment to cover the panels would be offset by the drop in the monthly electric bill; the prevailing opinion seems to be that if it's not, then you shouldn't bother switching (in fact, one company would not even give me a quote for a system because once I gave them my consumption information, they sa...

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...

I realize that I've been particularly bad about posting the last few months but have high aspirations to get back on a more regular schedule in the New Year. In the meantime, I hope that everyone is enjoying a happy and safe holiday season!