smartchica47's blog

Help a teacher!

2008-10-01T13:09:28-05:00

As someone who does research on school finance, particularly in California, I am all too aware that many of our public schools are seriously under-funded (I say 'many', not all, because there are also quite a few that are just fine, thanks to inequities in the way schools are financed, but that's a whole other discussion). While my research focuses on the systemic funding, I've always been most heart-broken by the stories about the impact on individual classrooms. We've all heard horror stories about teachers buying school supplies with their own money simply to make sure their students have basic items like paper and pencils. But even in situations where the school and students are relatively well-off, teachers will often reach into their own pockets in order to buy little things that can vastly improve their teaching - to use a simple example of my own, just last week I bought a bunch of candy to use for a classroom exercise on gains from trade and allocation of resources. This was not a huge expense for me but for public school teachers, such little things add up.

This is why organizations like DonorsChoose.org are so great. They create a way for people to donate to specific teachers for specific projects. You can donate any amount, you can search for schools in your local area or for classes in a particular subject. I am participating in their Blogger Challenge this month and encourage you to get involved as well! You can visit the Economics for Teachers giving page to donate to econ-specific projects, or search through hundreds of other projects. This is a great cause and a neat way to help teachers directly. Please check it out!

p.s. If any teachers (whether economics or anything else) want me to add your project to my giving page, just let me know! I'll be highlighting different projects over the coming weeks.

(cross-posted on Economics for Teachers)

Managing social media and multiple personalities

2008-07-24T22:32:22-05:00

Problogger's 'social media love-in' has me thinking once again about what exactly I'm doing with all this social media stuff. I have a Twitter account, and I'm on del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Facebook but I'm not very active on any of them. This is partly because I don't know very many other people who are actively using any of these sites, other than a couple who use Facebook a lot (among my friends, I'm definitely an early adopter). I also worry about what a huge time suck it could become if I actually started spending time finding new people to interact with. But mostly, I think it's that I'm simply not sure how to use these sites effectively to engage with people. That is, I just don't really get it - how does sharing my bookmarks or 160-character blurbs lead to real connection? In contrast, one of the things I love about blogging is that I feel like I can have conversations with people.

Still, I went ahead and added my info to Problogger's love-in*, figuring that maybe if I got to know more people who are on these sites, I could figure out what the appeal is and how to use social media more effectively. At the very least, I figured maybe I could get people to visit my blogs, which I feed through Twitter. But that raised a separate issue for me that I've been struggling with as a blogger: how to manage my different 'identities'. I have two blogs, one closely related to my job as an economics professor where I write about teaching and economics, and one that is more of a personal blog but with a definite focus on my life as a happily single woman. When I comment on other peoples' blogs, I identify myself with whichever blog fits the context. There isn't much overlap in the audiences for the two blogs and I actually have them set up under two different usernames, because I don't necessarily want my students to be reading my personal blog (I don't think it's a huge issue if they find it, I just don't really want to make it particularly obvious or easy for them).

But on my social media accounts, everything is jumbled together. My Twitter followers see my feeds from both blogs, my Facebook profile (which is the one account where I actually connect with my 'real world' friends) has a bunch of stuff that I don't necessarily want random other people seeing, and my del.icio.us account has all my bookmarks. Maybe it isn't that big an issue because people will use tags to find what they want and/or just skip over all the stuff that they find irrevelant. But does anyone else have concerns about keeping certain aspects of their lives separate, even if those different aspects are all out in the Web somewhere? Any advice for a social media newbie?

* by the way, I don't make money off my blogging, I just really like reading Problogger for ideas about being a better blogger in general

Learning to trust students

2008-07-15T11:13:16-05:00

I have many objections to super-large lecture sections (which, unfortunately, are my University's response to higher student enrollments) but probably my biggest gripe is that they provide a huge disincentive to have students write. Even with masters-level teaching assistants, and even if papers are short, I don't think any but the most masochistic professors would want to deal with grading for that many students. But one of the reasons that I have become so interested in Web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis is that they have the potential to get students writing, but without the need for me to monitor every word. So for my 500-seat Principles of Micro class this fall, I plan to give students the option to write blogs or participate in discussion boards. Given the size of the class, my thought is that I will give students a choice of four semester projects: one option will be volunteering for Junior Achievement, one involves participating in a class blog about economics around the web/in the news, one will be a discussion board on economics in popular culture (music, movies, TV), and one will be more traditional problem set assignments (through Aplia). I am still trying to figure out how the blog and discussion board projects will work (like how often they will be asked to post, how I will grade their efforts, etc.), but I'm pretty excited and hopeful that this will be a great way to get students to start seeing economics all around them.

However, a few weeks ago, I was telling a friend about my plan. She asked how in the world I was going to keep up with all my students' posts, pointing out that even if the majority of students choose the JA or problem set option, I'm still likely to have well over a hundred students either posting to the group blog or participating in the discussion board.

What does 'single' mean to you?

2008-06-19T15:16:26-05:00

I'm always curious about how and why people define 'single' the way
they do. That is, I think that for most people, when they meet someone
who identifies themselves as single, that means something specific, but
what it means varies from person to person. To me, it just means not
being in a serious relationship; I guess I equate it with 'available'.
But I know that for some, it distinctly means 'unmarried' (so for
example, my aunt would be considered single because even though she has
been living with the same man for about 30 years, she never married
him). To others, it means NEVER married - apparently, Dear Abby falls in that camp,
since she told a divorcee that calling herself single would not be
appropriate. I'm guessing she'd say the same to someone who was
widowed. As with many 'rules' of etiquette that haven't kept up with
the times, that bugs me. If someone wants to call themselves single,
who in the world has the right to tell that person he or she is 'wrong'?

Are the costs of learning new technology getting bigger?

2008-06-18T21:41:08-05:00

While re-thinking courses has always been a time-consuming undertaking, re-designing a course to incorporate new technology can be particularly time-consuming, and I wonder if the necessary time investment might be growing. It could just be me - I have spent much of my time exploring Web 2.0 tools (for example, setting up this blog!) and I've found this fascinating new world of blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, etc. to be both addictive and somewhat overwhelming. Every new blog I read leads me to others and every new tool I discover opens possibilities for my courses that I want to explore.

What does it take to get faculty to redesign their courses?

2008-06-16T23:29:39-05:00

Any professors who are truly interested in thinking more deeply about their teaching really should check out Steve Greenlaw's blog, if you haven't already. I always find that his posts make me think hard about my own teaching. In a recent post, Steve ponders why some faculty are more willing than others to make big changes to their courses. He observes that most faculty seem to see previous choices as constraints; that is, once we have chosen to go down a particular path, it becomes difficult (or perceived as difficult) to switch to a different path. So, for example, once we have prepped a course, most of us keep teaching that course in the same way semester after semester. This leads to a certain resistance to major changes, like adopting new technologies. And yet, there are some faculty who embrace these changes - what makes them different?

Choice and responsibility: self-help or just good economics?

2008-06-13T11:49:34-05:00

A recent post on Zen Habits talks about taking responsibility, pointing out that many people fail to take responsibility for their lives; everything is someone else's fault. As a teacher, I see this all the time in my students (the excuses are generally more creative than 'the dog ate my homework' but they are excuses nonetheless).
But as an economist, I have a hard time dealing with people who take this too far. Economics is the study of choices and what I try to get across to my students is that economists simply don't believe one can ever say, "I had no choice". Sure, some decisions are so trivial (do you get up when the alarm goes off or hit snooze?) or so easy (your money or your life) that we may not think twice about them but they are still choices - other people (or even you, on a different day) may choose a different option and when you do one thing when you could have done something else, then it's a choice to do what you did, conscious or not.

Do conservatives think women are clueless?

2008-06-09T16:51:28-05:00

Over on Have Children or Not, Beth asks whose 'fault' is it that women have delayed having children?
She quotes an article that essentially blames feminism for giving women
so many choices that they don't think about having kids until it is too
late. My first thought was, "Who could possibly believe any woman could
'forget' to have kids?" Even as someone who is pretty darn sure that I
don't want kids, I still sometimes worry that I might wake up one day
and suddenly realize I really do want kids and what if that
happens when it's 'too late'? The fact that I can't shake that
possibility from my head is what keeps me from saying I'll never
have kids. And I just can't believe there are very many single women
who don't have similar thoughts - it's simply too deeply ingrained in
our society that as women, we are supposed to want kids so it's
virtually impossible to make the opposite decision without giving it
some serious thought.

Multiple dimensions of confidence

2008-06-03T18:59:42-05:00

I am a pretty direct person. If I'm curious about something, I will usually ask; if I'm upset with someone, I will talk to them about it; and my colleagues know that if I have an opinion at work, I'm not shy about sharing it. I'm not always comfortable doing this but I don't think I'm obnoxious about it (or if I realize later that I might have been obnoxious, I usually go back and apologize). But when I read Zandra's story about striking up a conversation with a guy at the gym, my first thought was "Wow, I could never do that!" I also recently discovered Holly Hoffman's blog and she's had a few posts in the last month about confidence at work and with guys. All of which has me thinking about why it is that in some situations, I seem to have oodles of self-confidence but in other situations (primarily involving people I don't know but would like to), I might as well be back in junior high. Obviously, fear of rejection has something to do with it - it's easy not to take it personally if a waiter gets annoyed with me for saying my steak is over-cooked but detachment is a lot harder if I say hi to someone and they look at me like I've got two heads. At the same time, online dating has taught me to have a pretty thick skin and I think I've gotten pretty good at handling 'rejection' in that forum. So why does the idea of trying to talk to strangers seem so difficult? And I don't mean just guys - anytime I'm in a situation where I don't know anyone (for example, professional conferences), I find it incredibly difficult to meet people. Once I've been introduced to somone, I can make small talk until the cows come home but there's just some switch in my brain that flips from self-confident to insecure when I have to meet new people on my own. Does anyone else have these sorts of isolated insecurities?

[cross-posted at my personal blog, QuirkyEconomist]

Professors as Teachers

2008-06-02T23:44:13-05:00

I've been thinking about the fact that most college professors, regardless of field, don't really get any training in teaching. I wonder if college students are aware of that. It's actually really weird when you think about it, given that we all know from the first day of grad school that if we want to go into academia, teaching will be part of the job. And yet, most graduate programs (at least in economics) don't talk much about it.

Single-sex marriage is still marriage

2008-05-28T20:30:44-05:00

Two related posts have me thinking about the role of government in privileging certain relationships. On Feministing there is a lively conversation about the fact that gay marriage does not address "fundamental problems in inequality" since it still only bestows benefits like access to healthcare and medical decision-making on those who are married. Bella DePaulo makes the same point, though she specifically calls this out as singlism. The point of both posts is that marriage confers benefits that really should be available to everyone, not just those who are in a certain type of relationship.

Someone needs to write a book on Web 2.0 for aging educators

2008-05-25T00:20:56-05:00

I don't generally consider myself 'old' but when it comes to social networking and other aspects of Web 2.0, it's hard to deny that I am behind the curve; not as behind the curve as many of my colleagues, but behind the curve nonetheless. And yet, I've become something of a Web 2.0 junkie in the last month, as I've been considering ways to incorporate blogs into my classes. Investigating blogs led me to podcasting, Second Life, de.li.cious, Twitter, wikis, and Facebook...

Single people live in the village too...

2008-05-16T21:26:41-05:00

Most people don't think about singledom and kids in the same train of thought. But the fact that I don't want kids of my own doesn't mean I don't like kids. I'll admit I'm not all that great with little kids (for that matter, I'm not great with anyone, of any age, that isn't capable of being particularly rational), but one of the reasons I love my job as a professor is that I get to constantly interact with young people... Kay Trimberger points out that many happily single women have strong relationships with younger people...

Grading sucks

2008-05-15T10:13:57-05:00

Sorry to put it so bluntly but there is simply nothing fun about grading, on the side of either student or professor. The only exception I can think of is that I have often been amused when grading student papers, though that's not usually a good thing for the student. But my lament today is sparked by a recent story about a professor who has been denied tenure because he failed too many of his students (we're talking 80-90 percent got Ds and Fs).

Are laptops OK in the classroom?

2008-05-13T12:33:54-05:00

Ian Ayres has a Freakonomics post
today about students using laptops to surf the internet in class. He
brings up a couple good points, including whether there is any good a
priori argument against allowing students to multi-task. Certainly, I’d
love to think that I am so brilliant and fascinating that students will
avoid checking email for fear of missing one scintillating moment – but
since I also live in the real world, I’m a bit more torn.