Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

I gave my first midterm of the semester in the 500-seater yesterday. Every semester, I beg, plead, admonish, threaten and cajole my students to a) use the right scantron form and b) fill it out correctly. Since there are four versions of the exam, that means they must fill in the bubble for their version (A, B, C, or D), as well as bubble in their 9-digit ID number. If either of those is missing, the machine that reads the forms will stop and I either have to manually type in their ID (since many students will write the number but just not fill in the bubbles) or skip their form entirely because without a version letter, I don't know which key to use. That leads to many students coming to my office later, to ask why they got such a low score and I end up manually grading their scantron, once they figure out which version of the test they took. I have considered telling students that I won't do this, that if they get a zero on the multiple-choice part because they screwed up, th...

[Warning: this is a bit longer and more of a rant than my usual posts but there's also quite a bit of real economics here] For the last several days, I have been reading about California's budget mess with increasing horror. I honestly cannot understand what is going on with the Senate Republicans (Note: my frustration is really aimed at Senate Republicans because they are the ones holding up the budget process. From what I've heard, Assembly Republicans are ready to sign off if the Senate does). I have quipped on both Facebook and Twitter that my Econ 102 students understand California's budget situation better than the Senate Republicans and while I was partly sarcastically expressing my frustration, the more I've thought about it, the more I'm wondering if it's true. Last week, my class learned about Production Possibility Frontiers and I used the state budget as my example. Specifically, the 2008-09 budget started out, at some distant point last summer, ...

My department is beginning to talk about writing new questions for our teaching evaluations. One of my colleagues wants to only ask 'objective' questions, such as whether professors are in their office when they say they will be, whether they were on time (or even present) for classes, etc. His reasoning is that faculty can control whether they are doing a "professional" job (his word, not mine) but we can't control what our students do. As he put it (and I quote): "The problem with measuring how much students are learning is that there is an implicit assumption that we are responsible for how much they learn. The responsibility is both ours and theirs, yet we don't ask questions about how responsible they are being." On one level, I can understand where he's coming from. On the other hand, my personal philosophy was pretty much summed up by Scott at Dangerously Irrelevant in a recent post that was succinct but powerful: Two problematic beliefs ...

I have finally put my finger on why I like Obama so much (other than the obvious): he thinks like an economist. Specifically, he understands how to separate the positive from the normative. For example, this is from last night's press conference: "When people suggest that, what a waste of money to make federal buildings more energy efficient -- why would that be a waste of money? We're creating jobs immediately by retrofitting these buildings, or weatherizing 2 million American's homes, as was called for in the package. So that right there creates economic stimulus. And we are saving taxpayers when it comes to federal buildings potentially $2 billion. In the case of homeowners, they will see more money in their pockets, and we're reducing our dependence on foreign oil in the Middle East. Why wouldn't we want to make that kind of investment? Now, maybe philosophically you just don't think that the federal government should be involved in energy policy. I hap...

I often tell my students that I believe part of my job is to help them develop the 'soft skills' like time management and responsibility that they will need in order to be successful in the workplace. But it has occurred to me that this may not mean much when students don't see any connection between school and life after graduation. I don't know why they don't but I simply can't imagine that they would ever treat a job the way they treat their classes. Case in point: in my writing class, students were supposed to read a classmate's paper and give feedback by midnight on Friday, so the writers could revise and submit final drafts by 4pm today (Sunday). Three students did not post their feedback AT ALL, leaving their classmates high and dry. I was at a bit of a loss - I had thought the peer pressure of being responsible to a classmate would be strong enough that I hadn't actually figured out what to do if they flaked out completely. That is, there's ...

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I'm teaching a new writing-intensive course for econ majors this semester. It's an entirely new course and I'm flying a bit blind but tonight was the second meeting and so far, so good. The point of the course is for students to develop their ability to 'think like economists' by learning to 'write like economists'. But since the vast majority of these students will not go on to graduate work, the writing they will be doing consists primarily of short reports, similar to what they may be expected to produce when they go get real jobs. The way I've structured the course is that each week, half the class will be writing (there was 23 students enrolled) and the other half will be "critical readers". I wanted to have them do peer reviews because a) I believe that thinking about what makes someone else's writing good or bad can be helpful for improving one's own writing, and b) let's face it, I just don...