As part of the review process for our non-tenure-track lecturers, tenure track faculty sit in on a couple of lectures and write a report about their experience. Yesterday, I sat in on a lecture in Economics 101, given in the Lorch Hall auditorium to about 250 students.
It struck me as I sat there that this may have been the first time I had ever been in an economics lecture class with more than 75 students, either as a student or a professor. I managed to avoid such classes in my undergraduate days at Washington by hiding out in the honors program and I have never had to teach one as I teach mainly graduate courses, undergraduate regression (around 70 students both at Michigan and Maryland) and various honors seminars. So yesterday was a real cultural experience for me.
I sat in back with the slackers. The fellow to my left had his sullen face wrapped in one of those hoodies; he looked like someone who would figure in the opening scene of a Law and Order episode. To my right was someone playing games on his mobile phone while ahead of him another fellow improved his solitaire skills on his laptop. I use the first instance of behavior like this in my econometrics class - this year it was a female student reading the newspaper during a lecture - to announce that I would prefer that students either pay attention or stay home. Saying it once seems to have the desired effect. The rest of the kids around me in Economics 101 were actually paying attention in one way or another.
At the end of class, the students were astoundingly rude, both to the instructor and to their fellow students. The noise level rose noticeably about five minutes before the end of the lecture and continued at a high level as the instructor raised her voice to overcome the suffling and packing.
One student asked for an example of a firm that engages in price discrimination during the corresponding part of the lecture. To my surprise, the instructor did not give what would seem the most obvious and salient answer - namely the University of Michigan - but instead gave an obscure answer about some business services company. Maybe giving the obvious answer would be a bit too much honesty for the Economics 101 students.
The class featured a display of technology I had heard about but not seen. The students had remotes that they could use to answer a question in real time during the lecture. This allowed the instructor to determine how well the students were grasping the material. About 2/3 of the students got the correct answer to a very simple question about two-part pricing. I can imagine using this technology in a class but I wonder how they keep the students from losing the remotes or from forgetting to bring them to class.
Whew.
7 years ago
