Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

A recent commentary in the Chronicle suggests that " To Solve the Skills Gap in Hiring, Create Expectations in the Classroom ". The author notes that employers today report larger gaps in 'soft skills' like time management, work ethic, motivation and professionalism, than in technical skills; yet, the policies adopted by many college instructors do not do much to help students develop those necessary skills. The author refers to her own policies about expecting students to arrive to class and turn in work on time, not offering extra credit, etc. I think most instructors try to find an appropriate balance between holding students accountable for acting like adults, and understanding that sometimes, life happens. For what it's worth, I thought folks might be interested in how I handle this, at least in my upper-division writing course. In that course, I use a form of specification grading - it's not full-blown specs grading but students' grades are based ...

The SDSU Center for Teaching and Learning finally has a new website and I have to say hallelujah! It seems like a small thing but as someone who spends a lot of time on the Web, the old site was sooooo painful to deal with. But we've now moved to Wordpress so there's a blogging feature, which means I can tag stuff and people can actually find it, and there are cool plug-ins to deal with stuff like the events calendar and faculty profiles. Yeehaw! One of the challenges of moving to the new site is that I've been killing myself to get content on the site so there's actually something there worth looking at. Before we went live, I added a bunch of back-dated posts for old events, but I also am trying to create content that is actually useful for instructors who want to know more about some specific topic . Given the wealth of information that already exists, I'm mostly curating links from other places but also trying to highlight 'best practices' and provid...

Speaking of having students set some criteria , I've also been thinking about having students set some of the class rules (that I would typically set down for them). I was originally thinking about this in the context of my writing class, having students decide things like what the penalty would be for late assignments (and what constitutes 'late'), etc. But then I heard about the Cornell instructor who got upset when a student yawned super-loud in one of his classes. While I can see why people think he over-reacted, I am completely sympathetic - whenever this has happened to me, I have been sorely tempted to stop class and make a sarcastic comment to the yawner. I mean, it's just so freakin' rude ! [Note: I'm not talking about just simple yawning here (though personally, I was taught that if you're going to yawn while someone is talking, you at least cover your mouth and try not to be obvious about it). Visually obvious I can live with; it's the on...

I've been using clickers for several semesters now and I can't imagine teaching without them. But one drawback has always been that I can only ask multiple-choice questions. When I teach 500 students, I don't see any other option (at least for things where students' answers will count toward their grade in some way). But this semester, I have had a few application exercises in the data class where I wanted groups to come up with short responses to open-ended questions. I have thirteen teams in one section and ten in the other so grading their responses is not a big deal but I had to figure out how to collect them. One of the tenets of TBL applications is that teams should report simultaneously - easy enough with responses to multiple-choice questions (either with clickers or cards) but more difficult with longer responses. I ended up using Poll Everywhere , a very cool site that allows anyone to create a multiple-choice or open-ended poll and people can respond via ...

I always think it's a bit odd when textbook reps come by my office in the middle of the semester - I listen politely and then tell them (every single time), "I won't be thinking about this until the summer." It puzzles me because they never seem to come at a time of year that actually makes sense; I mean, does anyone ever decide to adopt a new textbook in the middle of the term? I sort of assume most professors are like me in that even if they are considering switching textbooks (or they are prepping a new course for which they need to choose a text), they wait until summer to sit down and think about it. Which is probably why I've seen at least a couple blog posts on the subject lately - the Teaching Professor had a post about the role of the text in course planning , pointing out that many faculty design their courses around the text, which can lead to too much focus on content, and Lisa Lane has a post about her personal experience finding an exceptional text ...

I'm contemplating using Google Buzz as a way to broadcast announcements and stuff to my classes. At one point I was thinking about using Twitter for that but not very many students are actually on Twitter. I've also thought about setting up a Facebook page, at least for the 500-seater, but when I've surveyed students about that option, the response has been pretty lukewarm. I already tell students to use my gmail address (since my official school email account seems to get way too much spam), and I know that a lot of them have gmail accounts themselves. I use Facebook to connect with people I'm actually friends with, and Twitter for connecting with random bloggers and other online acquaintances (though I haven't been tweeting much lately at all), and I kind of like the idea of having a separate way to communicate with students. I just don't know if any of my students would actually want that. I guess I can give them the option and see how it works...

Last week, ProfHacker asked ' how do you handle add/drop? ' and I meant to leave a comment but then got busy. When I went back to look at how others responded, I had to laugh at Courtney's comment , which starts out, "Add/drop makes me extremely grumpy." I agree completely. In my 500-seater, I've been giving out add codes to anyone who asks because the class was severely under-enrolled (I started the semester with only 297 registered) and my department as a whole is under-target for our FTEs. I warn students that they can't make up any assignments they've missed (though I drop a few clicker scores at the end of the semester so as long as they don't miss anymore, it won't really matter) but although I think what I cover in the first few weeks is the most important stuff we do all semester (since it's really hammering home the core principles), the reality is that if students miss these first few weeks, it's probably not that big a deal. ...

Last semester sort of sucked and I'm still trying to figure out why. And what I mean by 'it sucked' is that I felt like my students were more confused than in the past, more whiny than in the past, and I was often more frustrated than in the past (and I should say that I am referring entirely to my principles class - my upper-division Econ for Teachers class was fine). I think that part of it was a general issue of students (and faculty and staff) being affected by the budget cuts. I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for students to keep straight which classes were canceled because of furloughs on any given day. But I also wondered if part of the issue with the Principles class in particular was because I was teaching it as a Tuesday/Thursday class when I had previously taught it as a Monday/Wednesday/Friday class. Aside from the fact that I had to tweak all my materials to make lectures flow OK, I just think 75 minutes is a long time for students to be s...

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...

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 ...

Lisa of Lisa's (Online) Teaching Blog has put her finger on something that has been bugging me for the last several weeks: After years of being accommodating to students, and providing flexibility to deal with their hectic schedules, and alternative assignments to cater to learning styles, we’ve done it. We’ve helped create an entire generation of students who assume alternatives for everything, and expect us to accommodate everything. They also comfortably assume that every instruction, limitation, restriction applied to their coursework will be repeated to them many times in a variety of formats, and are, at any rate, negotiable if they didn’t get it the first four times... Enabling, that’s what they call it. I really don’t like to be harsh, but I can’t imagine them negotiating every deadline (most don’t even bother to negotiate it — they just skip it and hand it to me later) and requiring instructions be repeated four times in the working world. I hope they grow up to be highl...

One of the first lessons I learned as a teacher was the importance of setting student expectations early, making it clear from day one what students can expect from your class in terms of workload, schedule, learning outcomes, etc., and then being consistent. Students may not be happy about everything but my experience is that they will accept a lot as long as it isn't unexpected. Unfortunately, I didn't do so well with that this semester. For various reasons, I found myself making changes mid-semester and I know that many of the emails I'm dealing with now are because of that inconsistency. There are certain changes I think are justified and I don't think there's anything wrong with making mid-semester adjustments when something I'm doing isn't working for a majority of students (like adding the online quizzes ). But what's bumming me out is that some of the changes I've needed to make are things I should have anticipated. For example, at the beginn...

[This is the email I sent to my students today, with my solution to the attendance problem I wrote about last week . Coincidentally, InsideHigherEd has an article today on clickers that summarizes some of the issues with using them.] Dear students, As I mentioned on Friday, I have been considering how to re-structure the points for the clicker questions. The failure of the clickers this past Wednesday, the number of people who left at that point, and the relative quiet of the ensuing class, made me realize that by attaching points to clicker questions, I may have been doing you all a disservice. I don't want anyone to feel that they "have" to come to class just to get points. Obviously, I would hope that my lectures are sufficiently engaging and useful that you would see the benefit of attendance but I have always believed in treating my students as adults and as we discussed at length at the beginning of the semester, everything in life is a choice, including coming to ...

For some reason, I wasn't able to use the clickers yesterday. CPS for PowerPoint seemed to be working but when I started the slideshow, I got an error I'd never seen before. Since it didn't go away when I closed and re-started the application, I decided to just get on with the lecture. But I did announce that the clickers weren't working and if anyone wanted to leave (since I knew that some students would), to please leave now so as not to disturb everyone else later. Well, quite a few more students left than I expected (seriously, about one quarter to one third). There were still probably about 250 students who stayed but it's amazing how empty a 500-seat classroom feels when it's only half full! But what was really striking was how wonderfully quiet the rest of the class was! With over 400 students, there is always a lot of chatter around the room - I try not to let it get too bad but there's only so much I can do so there's always a low-level buzz i...

It's Week 8 of our 15-week semester (yes, I keep track, though that's largely because my syllabus is laid out by week), so we're halfway through and this is usually around the time when I ask my students to do a mid-semester evaluation. This year, I'm a bit hesitant because honestly, I don't have the time or energy to make any real changes and my patience has already been stretched so thin by student demands that I'm loath to invite them to tell me what they think is wrong with the class. But I do think it's worth taking some time to reflect on how the semester is going. In my Principles class, my main concern is that the pace of the class is too slow, that we are not "covering" as much material as we should. I'm sort of having a hard time assessing this because I switched around the order in which I'm presenting topics so things are a bit jumbled up. Judging from the responses to clicker questions, students seem to be grasping the materia...

I am the first to admit that there are a lot of things going on with my Principles class - they've got clickers and Aplia to register for, plus podcasts, videocasts, Powerpoint slides and occasionally extra stuff to read, all posted on Blackboard. I get that there's a lot, I really do. That's why I have handouts that explain everything, why I explain things again in class, and when I get multiple emails from students with the same question, why I will email the whole class with my explanation (and post the text of that email on Blackboard, since some students don't get my emails even though I've told them to fix their accounts so they will). And yet, I know I will still get emails from students with questions I have already answered. At that point, is it terrible of me to be a bit annoyed/ bewildered? Of course, the supportive teacher in me feels compelled to answer every one of these emails, repeating the information one more time. But the crotchety adult in me c...

As a new teacher, one of the first things I learned was the value of shutting up. My own classroom style has always included asking a lot of questions, even fairly obvious ones, to make sure that students are with me. But if you're going to ask questions, you have to get comfortable with letting there be silence and just waiting for an answer. Most students will never answer if they think they don't have to so they sit and wait, either for someone else to answer or for the teacher to give up and move on. So I've gotten fairly used to waiting them out and it usually works. But today I re-discovered how uncomfortable silence can be. I don't know if it's a glitch in the new version of the clicker software or what, but after students have answered a question with their clickers, the computer takes quite a while to process the data and let me return to my regular slides. This happened to a lesser degree last year (and with 300-400 responses, I don't expect the system...

(This is the email I sent to my Principles students, all 500 of them, this week) Welcome to Economics 102, Principles of Microeconomics! I’m looking forward to seeing you all in class next Wednesday and hope that we will have a productive semester together. There are just a couple things I wanted you to know/think about before our first class meeting. The course website on Blackboard is now available and I encourage you to take a look around; in particular, please look over the syllabus before our first meeting (it is posted under “Course Information”). We will discuss the syllabus in class but I will not have copies so feel free to get it off the website and bring it with you. If you are not familiar with Blackboard, go to https://blackboard.sdsu.edu/ to log in. Your username should be your Red ID and your password is your University PIN (i.e., the same information you use for WebPortal). If you do not know your Red ID number or you want to change your University PIN, contact SDSU e-...

I'm not a big user of instant messaging. I have accounts on Skype and GoogleTalk but I just don't use them very much. It's partly a network thing (relatively few of my friends are IM users) and it's partly an inertia thing (I'm very attached to my email). But I think that mostly, it's a workflow thing: when I do get IMs, I feel compelled to respond right away (and then wait for an immediate reply back) but a lot of time, I don't want to interrupt what I'm doing. With email, it feels much more OK if my response isn't immediate, and it allows me to choose who I reply to and when. Being more active on Twitter has both reduced and increased my concerns. It's taught me that not all messages require a reply (other than perhaps an acknowledgement), and it's gotten me in the habit of having a messaging app open all the time and ignoring a lot of the notifications (I use Tweetdeck so I can see when there are new tweets from certain groups, or @replies...

Over on The Volokh Conspiracy , Eugene asks if anyone knows of a service or site that will help him automate student appointments . Ideally, students could go to the site, see the available time slots, put in their names and be done. Since this is something that I would be very interested in doing myself, I was curious to see what suggestions he got. A couple commenters suggested Google Calendar (if you 'share' the calendar with all your students) but unless I'm missing something, that would require putting in the emails of all your students individually and that seems like a pain (at least for me - my smallest class is still 40 students). Another commenter recommends Jiffle.com, which looks promising but still requires some email back-and-forth. It occurred to me that a wiki might work - you'd have to create the calendar yourself but then students could go in and fill in their names and even if someone tried to 'erase' someone else's name from a time slot,...