🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1hl507INNoaq@terminator.rs.itd.umich.edu>, Hal.Varian@umich.edu
discusses his views on teaching economics in the context of his textbook
and classes. I have not been teaching principles in recent years, but I am
interested in teaching micro, both as a teacher (although only occasionally
of late, since I am currently at a law school) and textbook author, so I
thought I would put in a few comments.

One of the problems in teaching economics is that the students think they
already know it. The subject is all around them, and many of our technical
terms are words, such as "efficiency," whose meaning they think they know.
So a student goes along for a month "translating" the logical structure he
is being taught into a much fuzzier form along the lines of what he already
knows and only discovers that he is missing something when he fails the
midterm.

One solution to this I like is to get strongly counterintuitive results.
When you reach a conclusion the student knows is wrong (one of my favorites
is the argument showing that legalized polygeny benefits women but not
necessarily men, and vice versa for legalized polyandry) he suddenly has to
pay attention.

So far as computer programs, I think it is possible to do much more than
automated testing. I have a collection of three programs that go with my
text (all of which I wrote). In one, which is designed to help students
intuit the calculus concepts that they forgot from the previous year's math
course, the student draws either TC, MC, or AC freehand on the screen (with
a mouse), while the computer draws in one or both of the others. That way
the student can play around with the curve, trying to how the curves are
related. In another you have a MacDraw like environment for doing budget
line indifference curve diagrams. My original idea is that if a student
encounters indifference curves as a picture in a book showing 3 of them, he
will assume there is nothing in between. If he encounters them as "click
anywhere, the program draws the indifference curve through that point" he
is more likely to get the intuition that they are dense.