Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

Seriously, it was a weird semester (or 'is', since it isn't technically over yet). On the very bright side, my upper-division writing class was wonderful - I think this was the first time in thirteen years of teaching that every student in a class completed every major assignment (I'll ignore a handful of minor, not-paper assignments but even those had a 95% completion rate). There were some that were a few days late but there are no ZEROs for papers in my gradebook. I don't know if that was because I scared the heck out of the students on the first day, warning them about the amount of work in the class (one of my students commented in his end-of-course evaluation that on the first day, he thought, "Wow, this lady is INTENSE"), or it was because many of the assignments required that student swap papers with someone else and they didn't want to let down their peers, or if this was simply a particularly responsible group of students. Given that I also h...

For those who don't know me personally, and haven't figured it out from my name, I am a Japanese-American woman. I'm closer to forty than to thirty but because of my genes, I look a lot younger than I am. So it's not uncommon, when people find out what I do, for the response to be something along the lines of, "Gee, you look more like a student than a professor!" It took me a long time to not be offended by this. I realize that most people consider it a compliment, that they are saying I look much younger than they now realize I must be, but no matter how many times I hear it, it's hard not to think that they are saying something about more than just my youthful looks. It feels like they are saying that I'm somehow not a "real" professor because I just don't look the part. And of course, when these comments come from students, I immediately worry that if they think I don't look like a professor, then they won't treat me like a p...

I wrote a little while ago about how I don't actually like group work . But a recent post from the Teaching Professor made me think twice about how I 'privilege' working independently: We were discussing small groups and what to do with those students who resist participating in groups. They’re those independent learners who participate in group activities reluctantly and almost always prefer to do it alone. Should we excuse them from group work when they want to go it alone? There were points made on both sides. If they don’t learn well in social contexts, then why should we place them in situations that compromise what they’re going to learn? But group work is expected in so many professional contexts. Aren’t we doing students a disservice if we don’t help them develop the skills they’ll need to function effectively in groups? Then Professor Betsy Mudler made an interesting observation—something I’d never thought of before. We are concerned about whether we sh...

In class last week, I did an activity with the students that demonstrated free-riding. Students are given a hypothetical dollar and have the option of keeping their dollar or contributing to the Public Account. For each dollar in the Public Account, everyone in the class receives some amount (I use $0.10 in the big class). So, for example, if 100 students contribute to the Public Account, everyone gets $10: anyone who contributed would have $10 but those who kept their dollar would have $11. We do several rounds, with some discussion at various points, and to give students incentive to think about maximizing their 'profit', I give them bonus points equal to some percentage of their total earnings. As expected, some students free-ride; in my class, there were about 75% who contributed to the Public Account in the first round but that quickly dropped to 50% in the second round, about 30% in the third round and about 15% in the fourth round. At that point, we had some discussio...

By now, you may have heard about the biology professor at Louisiana State (Baton Rouge) who was removed from teaching an intro course where "more than 90 percent of the students... were failing or had dropped the class." The majority of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed story about it are supportive of the professor, particularly given that it seems like the administration did not even talk to her about the situation before acting. I tend to fall in the "there's got to be more to the story so I'll reserve judgment" camp but the story definitely struck a nerve with me, partly because I recently spent 30 minutes "debating" with a student about whether the last midterm was "too hard" and the whole conversation was super-frustrating. To give some background: I give three midterms and a cumulative final, plus have clicker points and Aplia assignments that make up about 20% of the final grade. I do not curve individual exams but will cu...

Just got back from a super-productive workshop for folks working on modules for the Starting Point project . If you are not yet familiar with the Starting Point site, you definitely need to go check it out! The site "introduces economists to innovative teaching strategies developed both within and beyond the discipline of economics. It provide instructors with the tools to begin integrating and assessing these teaching strategies in their own classrooms and promotes the sharing of teaching innovations among instructors." Right now, there are three modules available ( context-rich problems , teaching with cases and cooperative learning ) but six more will be available in a few weeks (on classroom response systems, experiments, demonstrations, quantitative writing, computer simulations and undergraduate student research) and the rest (including the one I'm working on, on Interactive Lectures) should be live by the fall. The big idea behind Starting Point is that there ar...

One of the side effects of actually caring about teaching is that when I come across something that I think will be useful for my students, I really want to implement it NOW. But combine this with a full plate of research, service and (an attempt at) a personal life, and there simply are times when I have to accept that what I am already doing is 'good enough' and I need to wait until next time around to add in whatever it is I want to do. I'm struggling with this right now because I've been working what feels like around the clock for the last couple weeks and I know I need to let some things go. But I also recently picked up Joseph Williams' Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace and it has me wanting to completely re-vamp my writing class. This is an amazing little book! One of the things I really struggle with in teaching a writing class is that even when students can see that something they have written is not all that clear, I don't know how to help them ...