Quota

In an effort to meet my informal quota of two blog posts per month, I thought I'd talk about the coming fall.

I'll be taking a couple of classes, and doing a reading class with a professor. Every year, I feel a little bit less like a student in a class and a little bit more like a researcher, which is after all a major goal of graduate school in the first place. The plan is that by the end of the next school year, I'll have some working dissertation topics and a committee lined up.

I'm also teaching a night class this fall. I've taught the same course before, both on my own over the summer and as a TA, but this will be a bit different. I'll have 15 class periods to work with, each 3 hours long. This would make it a lot like intersession, which I've also done before, except there's a week between each lecture. I need to figure out a way to keep students thinking about economics the other five days of the (working) week.

I'd love to orient the class around stories: have them do a reading assignment before each class, discuss the intuition for the first hour, then teach some technical tools and work problems related to the previous and next stories in order. Microeconomics is great for this approach, as demonstrated by this bestseller. This is certainly not an unheard of technique in formal literature on economics instruction.

However, I'm not quite sure how to go about it. I may end up doing something much closer to what I've done in the past, not as a matter of preference, but as a matter of convenience. Sure, people remember stories better than numbers, but numbers are straightforward, and when used properly, quite unambiguous compared with stories.

Balance is a tricky thing.


(As a side note, which would be more interesting to this readership: a comic-book / BGG - type post, or another zombie apocalypse post? Since those stories seem to be what people remember about this blog...)