Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

I'm on furlough today - my first furlough day on a teaching day. For any non-Californians reading this, the CSU faculty are required to take 9 furlough days each semester this year; unlike faculty in the University of California system, we are allowed to schedule ours on days when we teach (i.e., we can cancel classes), though we were still required to get approval of our furlough schedule from our department chairs. After a lot of agonizing, I decided to take three of my nine days on teaching days and I scheduled them on the days prior to the three midterms in my Principles class. That might sound odd, since this would presumably be when my students would most need me around but I have always used the class meeting before an exam to do an in-class review session; I figured that by canceling those, students would need to do more work on their own but I wouldn't actually have to cut anything from the curriculum of the course. Unfortunately, since I scheduled my furlough days ar...

I've been waffling about joining the gym at school - I used to belong, let my membership lapse when I went on sabbatical, and haven't re-started it, though I am incredibly out of shape. I keep saying, "I really need to get back in shape" so recently a friend asked, "Why don't you just bite the bullet and join the gym? Then you'll have extra motivation to go since you'll already be paying for it." I laughed and explained that unfortunately, this is one of those times when I think too much like an economist - most people would think as my friend does, that paying the monthly fee would give me an additional incentive to go, but as an economist, I think about the fact that once I've paid the monthly membership fee, it's a sunk cost. Whether I actually go use the gym or not, the fee will be charged to my credit card, so simply paying the fee will have no impact on my decision to go to the gym on any given day. The marginal cost of going to t...

Considering how much time I spend talking in front of large groups of people, you would think that I would eventually stop being nervous about it. And for the most part, I am way more comfortable than I used to be; for example, I no longer rehearse my conference presentations word-for-word in front of the hotel mirror the morning of my session (well, not word-for-word anyway). But I'm still waiting for the semester when I don't feel really, really nervous before my first class meetings (and I'm talking 'think I need to go throw up' nervous). And it's not just because I have 500 students - I get this way before my smaller classes too. The thing is, I know that as soon as I walk in and start talking, I'll be fine; it's not like I'm imagining some disaster that I won't be able to handle, or I think the students will totally hate me. But knowing that I'll be fine doesn't seem to diminish how nervous I am beforehand. I suppose, in some ways,...

- Greg Mankiw is teaching a freshman seminar this fall and shares his reading list here .* - J.D. on Get Rich Slowly has a really nice overview of federal taxes , including showing historical marginal and average tax rates, an international comparison of tax burdens, and how much we pay per billion dollars of government spending (along with useful links for the source data for all that). - That last point, about how much we pay, is from the guy who does the death and taxes poster, which I had heard about but never actually seen. It's pretty amazing, showing "...over 500 programs and departments and almost every program that receives over 200 million dollars annually. The data is straight from the president's 2010 budget request and will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress to begin the fiscal year." - And this one isn't really about teaching economics but I can't understand why more people aren't talking about the 'public option' that exi...

NPR's Marketplace has had a feature this past week where they have talked to economists about some lighter topics. A couple might be interesting to principles students, particularly Justin Wolfers talking about the opportunity costs of exercise and Betsey Stevenson talking about searching for a mate. Friday's segment with Paul Kedrosky is a good example of how economists think (and how we can't really turn off that mode of thinking, even when we're doing pretty mundane stuff).

I find myself working on several projects this summer that involve writing about my teaching approach in the 500-seat Micro Principles class and I thought that readers here might be interested as well. I previously posted about how I use clickers and podcasts . Most economics professors have, by now, heard of Aplia but for anyone who hasn't, it is a company founded by Paul Romer that basically provides online assignments. They work with several publishers and if you use a textbook they partner with, you can get problem sets customized to that text and an online version of the book. The first semester I used Aplia, I assigned several of the problem sets that corresponded to the Mankiw text I use. Students tended to hate them, I think largely because I did not edit the questions carefully enough, to make them match what I do in class and the questions I ask on exams (I don't use the publisher-provided test bank). In subsequent semesters, I have assigned fewer problem sets, and...

I find myself working on several projects this summer that involve writing about my teaching approach in the 500-seat Micro Principles class and I thought that readers here might be interested as well. I previously posted about how I use clickers . One of the challenges for faculty who want to make their classes more interactive is that these activities generally take more time than simply lecturing on the same material. I absolutely believe that using clickers and other in-class activities lead students to a deeper understanding of ideas, and I have always taken more of a 'depth over breadth' approach anyway. Still, when I started using clickers, I knew that I would have to make some adjustments and cover even less material. One way I have made time in class is that I have stopped using class time for basic definitions. Instead, I require that students listen to short podcasts (no more than five minutes) that I record using Audacity , a freeware sound editor. The podcasts give...