Yesterday afternoon was spent at Ed Rister's house eating BBQ from a place called Snow's in Lexington, supposedly the best in Texas.
Along with spelling his name wrong in an earlier post, I also totally mussed the background for the BBQ. One of his research assistants is finishing his Masters at TAMU and entering the Ph.D. program at Oklahoma State. The whole event was a big send-off/good-natured roast with all the faculty that advised him. Imagine that happening at Wisconsin. That's what I thought.
Big bonus: Ed's wife made up a plate to take home and is waiting in the fridge as I type.
Yesterday, was also the first day in BCS that I wasn't in the office. It was well-deserved, but not without guilt. I still wrote up a lecture at home.
Planning this intro class is becoming difficult. It is supposed to cover both micro and macro and trade with applications to agricultural economics. Besides the obvious difficulty of not knowing anything about agricultural economics, I dislike cramming macro and micro together.
Micro has obvious theoretical foundations that you simplify, but macro can get downright wrong really quickly. So, what's the point of teaching things which have to be untaught later? Worse, what if people walk away never unlearning.
Of course, I should be happy they learn anything, right or wrong.
But, I don't really teach for what the students learn. I actually enjoy being up there; they just happen to be the audience. And I prefer a good script.
The challenge is really being coherent: how do I tie everything I do back to just a production function, a budget constraint and an indifference curve. Obviously, most of undergraduate macro gets tossed by this criterion. Thus far, they have seen a Robinson Crusoe economy and the two period savings problem. I am just about to do the Solow model. I think everything else will have to be trade--money and inflation be damned.
Along with spelling his name wrong in an earlier post, I also totally mussed the background for the BBQ. One of his research assistants is finishing his Masters at TAMU and entering the Ph.D. program at Oklahoma State. The whole event was a big send-off/good-natured roast with all the faculty that advised him. Imagine that happening at Wisconsin. That's what I thought.
Big bonus: Ed's wife made up a plate to take home and is waiting in the fridge as I type.
Yesterday, was also the first day in BCS that I wasn't in the office. It was well-deserved, but not without guilt. I still wrote up a lecture at home.
Planning this intro class is becoming difficult. It is supposed to cover both micro and macro and trade with applications to agricultural economics. Besides the obvious difficulty of not knowing anything about agricultural economics, I dislike cramming macro and micro together.
Micro has obvious theoretical foundations that you simplify, but macro can get downright wrong really quickly. So, what's the point of teaching things which have to be untaught later? Worse, what if people walk away never unlearning.
Of course, I should be happy they learn anything, right or wrong.
But, I don't really teach for what the students learn. I actually enjoy being up there; they just happen to be the audience. And I prefer a good script.
The challenge is really being coherent: how do I tie everything I do back to just a production function, a budget constraint and an indifference curve. Obviously, most of undergraduate macro gets tossed by this criterion. Thus far, they have seen a Robinson Crusoe economy and the two period savings problem. I am just about to do the Solow model. I think everything else will have to be trade--money and inflation be damned.
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