An article about teaching intro econ courses was posted on Hacker News. Rather than put a comment there - where the other commenters typically have no familiarity with and strong opinions on these topics - I felt it would be better to post my comment on my blog to ensure nobody reads it.
The first issue I have is with this quote:
Today’s students are … not accustomed to sitting through 50-minute lectures, taking detailed notes of material and techniques, the value of which has yet to be demonstrated to them.
Well, there’s no good reason to teach that way. I sometimes do that, depending on the material, but I’m teaching upper-level courses for a more selective group of students. I nonetheless typically don’t do that. I use YouTube videos and news articles and general discussions to be sure they understand how we’re working with current events. Only after spending a ton of time on that do I say “Okay, now here’s a tool we can use to better understand this.” The theory/graph/equation is always secondary in my classes.
He indicates a couple of serious problems:
attendance was sporadic with many of my students
work outside of class was not done with consistency
I’m not sure there’s much that can be done in that case, beyond moving to a different job. These students have been through elementary, middle, and high school by the time they get to college. They know how the system works, and there’s nothing a faculty member is going to do about that. My guess (though I have no evidence) is that he works at a university that disincentivizes faculty giving low grades. Students know they’ll do okay whether or not they study, so they don’t study.
I was reminded of one other thing that a well-known economist told me years ago. The easiest years to get good evaluations from students is when your own kids are between the junior year of high school and the senior year of college. People change a lot from birth to working full-time. The only way to relate to college students is to have your own kids that age. A former department head was a strong believer in the importance of student evaluations when he started in the position, and a believer that they were useless when he quit. That just happened to coincide with the aging of his own kids. I wonder if this might not be at play for the author of the article. It says he’s been teaching since 1979.