Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

In my post yesterday , I pointed out that economists are not trained in pedagogy. But I’ve also been thinking about the fact that most college professors, regardless of field, don’t really get any training in teaching. I wonder if college students are aware of that. It’s actually really weird when you think about it, given that we all know from the first day of grad school that if we want to go into academia, teaching will be part of the job. And yet, most graduate programs (at least in economics) don’t talk much about it. Fortunately, at most schools, teaching assistantships are one of the few sources of department funding so many grad students do get some experience teaching, and I think many departments have at least some kind of orientation or maybe a one-day training session to make sure their TAs aren’t completely inept. But that’s about it.* Students who are interested in teaching, and new faculty in general, are mostly left to develop their teaching skills on their own. Sure, t...

Here's a great example for talking about normal and inferior goods and/or income elasticities: Emek Basker has estimated income elasticities of revenue for Wal-Mart and Target and finds that Wal-Mart, overall, is inferior and Target is normal.

As I sat in the Course Design Institute the other day, it occurred to me that much of the language being used by the speakers would be completely foreign to many of my colleagues in economics. I’m not even talking about the vocabulary of educational technology (though that would likely be even more foreign) – I’m referring to the language of pedagogy. For example, I’m pretty sure that if I asked around my department, very few of my colleagues would know what Bloom’s taxonomy is. The recent focus on assessment at my University means that many faculty are now able to articulate specific learning outcomes for their classes but my impression is that coming up with these learning outcomes is seen as something we are required to do to satisfy the University, not as something that could actually stimulate deep thinking about our classes and help improve our teaching. This is not to say that my colleagues are not dedicated teachers; most have an earnest desire to teach well. But economists ar...

In addition to the Economics for Teachers class, my fall schedule includes a Micro Principles course for 500 students. I taught that course for the first time last fall and knew I wanted to make changes but rather than the usual between-semester tweaks, I have essentially ended up redesigning the entire course, inspired by (and contributing to) my adventure in Web 2.0. So it was serendipitous that I was able to attend SDSU’s Course Design Institute today. A few highlights: Andrew Milne defining teaching as “The purposeful structuring of experiences from which students cannot escape without learning.” I just love that. Finding out about SWoRD , a new tool for peer review of writing. I definitely want to find out more about that, especially since I’ll be teaching a writing class next spring in which I was planning to have the students do lots of peer review anyway. Tom Carey talking about ‘threshold concepts’: ideas that, once students really get them, open the way to an entirely diff...

It's rare that one can bring up sex in an economics class without sounding like a contrived attempt to grab students' interest but Daniel Hammermesh has a nice analysis of the porn tax proposed by California Assemblyman Charles Calderon that would be a good starting point for a class discussion.

I don't generally consider myself 'old' but when it comes to social networking and other aspects of Web 2.0, it's hard to deny that I am far behind the curve; not as behind the curve as many of my colleagues, but behind the curve nonetheless. And yet, I've become something of a Web 2.0 junkie in the last month, as I've been considering ways to incorporate blogs into my classes. Investigating blogs led me to podcasting, Second Life, de.li.cious, Twitter, wikis, and Facebook (which also led to Pandora and I'm sure that's not anywhere near the end) (and I know I should provide direct links to all those websites but really, do I need to?). There's so much information out there and every website leads me to other websites with even more great information. I've probably added 20 RSS feeds to my aggregator in the last five days and I'm trying to be more selective but this is one of the pitfalls for academics in particular - we're always looking ...

I have been trying to think of good, practical examples of marginal analysis that I can use with my students (unlike many economists I know, I don't think it makes any sense to explain to students that 'if the movie stinks, you should get up and leave' - it might be the utility-maximizing thing to do but it's just too big a jump from human nature to be useful for teaching). EconomistMom may have a more useful example - she points out that when the marginal benefits from something (in this case, straightening out one's teeth) accrue over a lifetime, those benefits are automatically higher for a kid simply because they have more lifetime left. Economistmom goes on to talk about the implications for social policy (e.g., spending money on education versus cutting inheritance taxes); this could get into some nuances about investment vs. consumption but I think her point is a powerful one.