Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

Many readers of this blog are familiar with the idea of having music playing as students come into class each day. Just browsing through sites like ABBA to Zeppelin or Dirk Mateer’s media library will give you tons of ideas for songs with lyrics that relate to economic concepts. But for many of those songs, the economic references might be a little obscure. Sure, if you’re playing a song with the word “Money” in the title, students are going to get that there’s some sort of connection to economics but when you play a song like “Big Yellow Taxi” or “Soak Up the Sun”, chances are they’ll think you’re just playing random music and not realize it has anything to do with what they are learning. One way to make the connection clear is to use videos/animations that spell it out. This is why I’m a huge fan of Brian O’Roark’s Music for Econ videos. He created a bunch of flash files that show the lyrics for each song and also have images and text that highlight the economic concepts. When ...

Last month, I had a conversation with James Tierney for his Teach Me Econ podcast series. We ended up talking for over an hour so he broke it up into two parts and the first one is now posted . In this one, we talk a lot about economics at the K-12 level. The Council for Economic Education has a neat site, This Day in Economic History , that provides information on past events related to economics and personal finance (with related lesson plans for high school and Principles-level classes). Example: For February 6, 1919: "A five day strike involving around 60,000 Seattle union laborers, which basically shutdown the city, comes to a long awaited end." The AEA has posted webcasts of several sessions from the January meetings. They are a bit long but could be good discussion starters in any macro class. Antony Davies has a series of short videos covering a wide range of topics. These are ‘talking head’ lectures (i.e., just a video of a typical lecture) but focused and sho...

The water contamination issue in West Virginia sounds terrible for those living in the area but it’s a gold mine for econ teachers! In addition to the obvious implications for teaching externalities and regulation, you could also use this Marketplace interview with the owner of a chain of grocery stores as a jumping-off point to talk about price controls and shortages, or demand for complements and substitutes. Mark Maier and I have set up a  site and blog  to accompany our book,  The Data Game: Controversies in Social Science Statistics . In addition to a help page for instructors, we’ll be posting relevant links and examples from current events. If you teach any type of statistics course or other course that uses data, check it out! James Tierney’s site Teach Me Econ has some great ideas for teaching economics. He also does a podcast series about the economics classroom; the most recent is an interview with Eric Chiang , the author of the latest edition of the Cor...

I won’t be in Philadelphia but for those attending the meetings, here are all the education-related sessions I could find (please let me know if I missed any!): Jan 03, 2014 10:15 am, Philadelphia Marriott, Grand Ballroom - Salon L American Economic Association Experiments and the Economics Classroom (I2) (Panel Discussion) Panel Moderator : TISHA EMERSON (Baylor University) SHERYL BALL (Virginia Tech) TED BERGSTROM (University of California-Santa Barbara) CHARLES HOLT (University of Virginia) JOHN MORGAN (University of California-Berkeley) Jan 03, 2014 12:30 pm, Philadelphia Marriott, Meeting Room 305 National Association of Economic Educators Determinants of Student Achievement in High School and Undergraduate Economics and Personal Finance Classrooms (A2) Presiding : ANDREW HILL (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia) Does Student Engagement Affect Student Achievement in High School Economics Classes? JODY HOFF (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco) JANE LOPUS (California Sta...

Actual inflation might be running low but according to PNC's annual Christmas Price Index , the cost of Christmas is up 7.7% (or 6.9% if you sum up ALL the gifts for all the repetitions of the song). Of the individual items, nine ladies dancing is up the most, 20% - perhaps a sign of growing gender wage equality? PNC also calculates a 'core' index (10.6%) that excludes the swans, since they are the most volatile item in the basket, and they point out that this is analogous to the core CPI which excludes food and energy. Also, if anyone needs gift ideas for academic friends, this mug is a must-have! (also available as a t-shirt !)

If you haven't seen the call for submissions yet, the AEA is looking for proposals for the Fourth Annual AEA Conference on Teaching (at the undergraduate and graduate levels) and Research in Economic Education (all levels, including precollege). The conference will be held from May 28 to May 30, 2014 in Washington, DC at the Washington Marriott at Metro Center.  The conference is hosted by the Committee on Economic Education in cooperation with the  Journal of Economic Education .  Plenary talks will be given by Alan Blinder (Princeton), Kenneth G. Elzinga (UVA), Cecilia Rouse (Princeton) and other speakers TBA. Submissions for program participation will be accepted via the AEA online submission system. Submissions may be of individual papers, complete sessions of three or four papers, workshops, or panels. Complete session submissions are encouraged. The submission deadline is December 1, 2013. More information is available at  http://www.aeaweb.org/ committees/AEAC...

I’m getting ready for the 9th Annual Economics Teaching Conference later this week, in Austin. I’m doing two presentations, one Thursday morning on using cell phones in the classroom (i.e., Bring-Your-Own-Device audience response systems) and one Friday morning that is an Introduction to Team-Based Learning . If you’ll be there, come say hi!