A New School Year Begins

And so tomorrow morning we start. Last year's graduates for the most part are off to college, where we can only hope we properly prepared them as best they would let us. Older graduates return to college or to jobs, where again we hope they learned something of lasting value during their time in high school.

Tomorrow begins my tenth year of teaching, almost exclusively teaching high school seniors. I have my class rolls, filled with mostly unfamiliar names. The room is as ready as it is going to be; Monday's plan is ready; the powerpoint prepared, the handouts copied. After ten years I'm still nervous. Probably more nervous than most of the students who will sit before me tomorrow. You see, they see the light at the end of the tunnel - graduation. They're 17 or 18 and are ready to move on in life, to gain and exercise independence, to end this phase of their lives. From my side, I see the potential, and the future of our country and civilization, and I worry that I will be up to the task. I worry that I will adequately prepare them for college, while at the same time helping to prepare them for life. I know going in that some will like me, some will like my courses, and that some will dislike me and the subjects I teach.

And this nervousness is what convinces me that I am in the job that I was meant to do. The excitement of teaching, of trying to show someone new things, to show new ways of thinking, to expand horizons and opportunities - that's the thrill of teaching. And every year we get a new crop of students, and although some of the material and some of the lessons are the same, the discussions never are, the class personality never is, and the bonds we form with the students never are. It's a new job every year.

By May, I'll be tired and grumpy, whereas tomorrow I'll just be relatively rested and grumpy. But I really love what I do, and I can't wait until 8:45 tomorrow: IB Economics, and away we go.

Students Disciplined for Facebook/Myspace?

So the Burleson school district has decided not to discipline the student for the contents of her Myspace page (I thought everybody had moved to Facebook, anyway). This is a tricky and complex issue, and I thought the facts were especially bad for the school district. One of the basic things we learn in law school is that good facts make good law and bad facts make bad law. These were bad facts for Burleson.

Tha being said, it's amazing to me how many people seem to be unaware or unconcerned about what they post online (he says as he posts this stuff online). Like it or not, agree or disagree, the web is a public place. You shouldn't rely, as the student did, on the page you post the bad stuff onas being "private"; it's on the web: somebody can and will find it. I have often told students that in the old days, my company automatically used an applicant's credit report as a hiring qualification in the belief it was indicaitve of the applicant's character. If I was in human resources or looking to hire anyone these days, I think I would do a full-fledged internet search on that person, and I would include Facebook, Myspace, and anything else I could think of to get more information about an applicant. Someone's postings quickly give you a clue about how clueless someone is.

America's Best Colleges

An interesting list, to be sure. From Forbes magazine.

Shouting in the Dark?

When I started this a couple of weeks ago, I didn't quite realize how much care and feeding an interactive blog would need. I read voraciously, and follow a huge number of news and political websites, so the information that would be fun and interesting to discuss far surpasses my ability to post and comment. As school starts (soon), I still think this will be a fun way to interact and hopefully improve classroom performance by increasing exposure to economic and governmental thinking. I know there are more of you reading than have posted, and I would encourage you to comment and agree, disagree, question, and think "out loud". A lot of times I'm posting things to try to provoke thinking or discussion - in law school, all my classes used the Socratic method, so we learned by being questioned, not by being lectured to. I guess I'd like this to be like that. If you run across something that you would like to see discussed, send me a link and I'll put it up, maybe with or without comment. My opinions are just like everyone else's and not any more valuable, but if there is something you want me to comment on, let me know. I love to learn new things, so if there is something you don't understand, bring it to my attention and I'll try to help figure it out.

I know it's a busy time as summer ends, many of you are packing for college, others are putting off thinking for these last few days of summer, but I really would like some thoughts on whether this is a worthwhile thing for me to be spending my time on. Thanks.

Statistics is Hot!

Many of you who knew me or took my class in the past may not be aware, but last year I was able to bring back the Advanced Placement Statistics class at Bell. Most of you should know I'm a math geek and a college math major. We had 14 students who finished the course last year, 12 took the AP exam, and 11 made 2's or higher on the test, so all in all a good start. I'm not sure of my enrollment this year; I was hoping to get two sections but didn't.

Anyway, much as it pains me to say so, I found an interesting article about statistics in the New York Times, of all places (see, I don't just read conservative sources). Among my favorite quotes:

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”

"The new breed of statisticians . . . use powerful computers and sophisticated mathematical models to hunt for meaningful patterns and insights in vast troves of data." In the old days, we learned how to compute statistics. I'm intrigued that statistics nowadays is about interpretation and understanding - I think its a huge improvement in the discipline.

And for the material-minded: "The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate . . . ." Not too shabby.

I think one of the things that unites the two somewhat dissimilar classes I teach is that they are both among the more practical and useful courses we require students to take in high school. You need many of the basic mathematical skills taught in the other math courses, but I guarantee you that familiarity with statistical lingo and methods will be useful. If you're still at Bell, think about taking the course. If you're in college, it's a smart elective to take. I'm not saying it's an easy course, but it's one that will pay off for you.

School and Education Question - Reading and Homework

At the high school level, especially teaching advanced classes to primarily Seniors (12th grade), the material I teach can not be fully understood and mastered with only the exposure to what we do in the classroom. Besides the distractions of texting, sleeping, doodling, and daydreaming, there isn't enough time to cover it all. For those sensitive to bias, it also by definition limits the student to only being exposed to one point of view. Some of the things we cover in economics and nearly everything we do in Statistics must be practiced in order to be mastered. I've got a ping pong table - I have to actually play to get better; I can't just sit here at my computer and watch YouTube videos on how to play and hope to get better. Whether you realize it or not, the same is true of academic subjects.

So, dear former students, how does a caring, dedicated teacher devise a system that would have you actually read a textbook, ideally on a timely basis? How do we come up with a system that would create the proper incentives to get you to read and to do assigned homework problems? Graded? Completion? Daily? Weekly? By Unit? Extra Credit on tests or separate grades?

The best approach would be the one they get to use in college - you don't do the work at an acceptable level, you fail. As you all probably realize that is not realistic in our high school environment for reasons of administration policies, parental pressures, student's college admission needs, etc. But since I probably can't get away with failing the majority of my students because they have "Senioritis" and I desperately want them to learn and master my subjects, what am I to do?

Help!

What Do We Teach?

A few times last year, I mentioned the difficulty of trying to teach economics, particularly macroeconomics, at a time when all of our theories were falling apart. Economics has always been difficult for many because it is so theoretical and so dependent on simplifying but often unrealistic assumptions. However, it was a subject where the theories worked and made general sense - I'm sure you remember me saying that economics is really all about common sense.

But what do we do when the common sense disappears from the system? What do we teach when none of our theories seem to apply and none of our tidy policy solutions seems to work? In many ways this is a fascinating time for economic study, because it is a time like the 1930's when failures of our theories are causing us to reevaluate and refine our analysis. Does Keynesian fiscal policy work in this environment? Did it really work in the 1930's New Deal, or was that an illusion when the true economic recovery was due to other causes? I often have said the National Debt of the United States seemed manageable and appropriate to the size of our economy - that was before the deficit ballooned to unheard of levels. The past decades gave us confidence in monetary policy solutions to our problems, but the Federal Reserve Bank may have prolonged and enhanced the Housing Bubble as it tried to stave off deflation, while misreading the economic indicators in the first place. How do you conduct expansionary monetary policy when real interest rates are near zero? If the Fed injects massive quantities of money into the money supply to cause the economy to expand, can we really trust them to prevent the inflation that is poised to occur if the economy recovers? Do the facts support a supply-side, neo-classical approach, or were the policies of the past 15 years merely "pseudo-supply-side" and thus not helpful to our analysis? Do the supply side policies lead to social issues and how do we weigh those issues in our cost-benefit framework?

I have a lot of thoughts and ideas, but I certainly don't have the answers. I'm sure that my perspective as a 52 year old is very different from those of you who are very much younger. As I said, I wasn't sure how to teach theories that seemed to be crumbling around me by the minute. The picture above is from the cover of the Economist magazine's July 18th issue. In that issue, it says: " . . . a broader change in mindset is still needed. Economists need to reach out from their specialized silos . . . . For in the end, economists are social scientists, trying to understand the real world. And the financial crisis has changed that world."

What do you guys think?