Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

The other day I was having a conversation with a friend, who is not an academic, about the tenure and promotion process. We have a mutual friend who is going up for full professor and she's at the stage where her department is sending out the requests for letters. My non-academic friend was asking about the process and he made a comment about how stressful it must be given that, at this point, there really isn't anything one can do to influence those letters. I said that was kind of the point, that in order to become a full professor, one needs to have been consistently productive and building a reputation as a contributor in one's field. But lately, I've been thinking a lot about the costs of this process. In order to build that reputation, we all specialize, sometimes in pretty small niches. Of course, as an economist, I generally believe specialization is a good thing but when one has wide-ranging interests, becoming 'stuck' in a specialization can become ...

One of the things I did during my sabbatical was pull together resources for MacMillan's EconEdActive site. The site is now up and running, with several tools that allow users to comment, rate activities and add new resources. There will be a webinar next Thursday, June 25, at 11am PST (2pm if you're on the other coast), to provide an overview of the site. You can register here . Hope to 'see' you there!

Ah, it is finally summer! It's been a long, stressful school year and I am really looking forward to having some time to just breathe. One of the things I am really, REALLY looking forward to is having the opportunity to step back and think about my overall plan, both for the CTL and for my life in general (i.e., research and having a life outside school!). I feel like I spent most of this year just trying to keep things afloat while simultaneously figuring out what the hell I'm doing; that, in and of itself, has caused a lot of stress for me. My usual M.O. is to be much more methodical - I plan, I make lists, I develop clear goals before figuring out all the steps I need to take to reach those goals. While some people love to just jump in the car and drive aimlessly, seeing where they end up, I have always been a person who cannot enjoy the journey if I don't know what the destination is. It's OK if the destination changes as things happen along the way, but I'm ju...

Two recent events have me thinking a lot about the importance of the syllabus. I'm guessing a lot of readers have heard about the art class at UCSD with the 'nude final' . The nutshell version: a student's mother complained to a local TV station that her daughter is in a class where nudity is part of the final project; predictable uproar ensues. The fuller version : the class is not required, the nudity assignment is clearly stated in the syllabus and discussed on the first day of class (when students still have three weeks to drop the class), AND the assignment does not actually require students to be physically naked as there is an option that merely requires students to do a 'nude gesture' (the whole point is for students to share their 'naked self', either literally or figuratively). There are so many things about this story that drive me crazy, from the helicopter mom to the way-too-predictable reaction of conservative media. But I also think it...

I'm stressed out. Last week, I was having stomach pains and I swear, I'm worried I may have an ulcer. But when someone asks me WHY I'm so stressed, I'm not quite sure what to say. I just have this feeling of being overwhelmed, that I'm trying to juggle too many different balls and am constantly worried about dropping one. But at the same time, when I sit down and really look at everything I need to do (I am the queen of to-do lists!), I am pretty sure it is all under control. So why do I feel like it isn't? The only answer I can come up with is the meetings. Oh, the endless meetings! As a normal faculty member, pretty much the only set items on my calendar were my classes, my office hours and the occasional department meeting. But now, as CTL Director, my calendar is suddenly FULL of meetings and other scheduled events. Of course, there are the roughly weekly CTL events, but also biweekly meetings with Instructional Technology Services, biweekly meetings ...

Thank goodness for Spring Break! Between late February and end of March, I went to three different conferences (one in San Diego so I didn't have to travel anywhere, thank goodness) so I've spent all of this week just getting caught up... I learned so many cool things and my head has been swimming will too many ideas to manage but let me try to at least share a couple things with you all... At the CSU Symposium on University Teaching - where the conference theme was 'GRIT' - the pre-conference keynote was by Dr. Mary-Ann Winkelmes from UNLV's Transparency Project . The main gist was the importance of helping students understand how and why we ask them to do the things we ask them to do. The discussion was particularly interesting to me, given my last post about being more transparent in my writing class.  Jesse Vestermark, a librarian at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, gave a presentation on helping students critically evaluate online sources - also incredibly time...

Over on Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok has a post about the discomfort humans sometimes feel in following computer algorithms because they don't understand the underlying logic. He starts with the following anecdote: Once the boss told me to deliver package A then C then B when A and B were closer together and delivering ACB would lengthen the trip. I delivered ABC and when the boss found out he wasn’t happy because C needed their package a lot sooner than B and distance wasn’t the only variable to be optimized... It isn’t easy suppressing my judgment in favor of someone else’s judgment even if the other person has better judgment (ask my wife) but once it was explained to me I at least understood why my boss’s judgment made sense. My first thought upon reading that was that my husband would definitely say I am the same way - whenever he suggests doing something a certain way that is different from how I would have done it, he says I make my "87 percent face" - t...