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...)

30 Days

My wife and I just watched three episodes of 30 Days, which is a reality TV series that essentially has ordinary people live out of their element, usually along some specific controversy-inducing line, for a month. The first two episodes were entitled "Immigration," in which a member of the Minute Men lives with an illegal immigrant family for a month, and "Outsourcing," in which a programmer who just had his job outsourced to India moves to Bangalore to work in an outsourced job. Both episodes were reasonably thought out, surprisingly respectful, and all around good television. I felt compelled to blog about them.

The key thought that came to mind is that these two issues are intimately related. We complain about people breaking the law in order to participate in America's prosperity and work here, but we also complain about losing some of that prosperity if jobs go elsewhere. Much of the world lives in great poverty. The poor of other countries can't find jobs; if the wealthy countries don't send jobs there, the poor will try to come here by whatever means they can.

In the second episode, Chris (the guy who moves to India) said, "There's something fundamentally wrong with a world where children have to live like this." I doubt he meant it this way, but essentially I think he was complaining about the Fall of Man. All of these issues come down to the fact that this is not the way it's supposed to be. Families shouldn't have to break the law to feed their children; one person shouldn't have to be put out of a job so another can move his family out of a tent and into an apartment. We need Christ and His Kingdom.

Unfortunately, most of my deep thoughts on the matters were driven away by the third episode, "Atheist & Christian," which was just an awful piece of work. The episode followed an atheist stay-at-home mom who went to live with a Mardel's Christian family for a month. Utter. Rubbish. Nobody learned anything, nobody developed lasting bonds of friendship, and nobody even came off looking good. I highly recommend disc 1 of Season 2, but just watch the first two episodes.