Some links for class session on 10/3

The Princess and the Pea

A blog post from me on my regular blogging site that gives some diagnosis of what's going on with our class (and with your entire program of study).

The Dead Grandmother Problem
I'm pleased to say not one student in our class has used this line.  But several have told me they are going to miss my class because they have a midterm in another class.  This does not compute for me me, though it must make sense to the students who are telling me this.   What is evident is that many of you feel you are under a lot of stress.  If that is a new thing, perhaps it will help your planning in the future.  If you've experienced it in previous semesters, however, maybe you should consider lightening your load.

Doing a Post Mortem
The core idea is to better understand yourself, both your process and your thinking, by looking back at how you performed and asking why your performance was as it was.

Analysis of Experiment on Tuesday
I encourage you to identify yourself among the results and then ask why you behaved as you did behave.  Take this as your baseline.  Not only should the efficient volume of trade been reached (3 units exchanged), but it is also reasonable to expect that the gains from trade be split equally between the buyer and the seller.  If that happened, then you did what the model predicts.  If it didn't happen, however, why didn't it?  When you've reached some conclusions from that, you can either leave them as a comment to this post, which makes sense if you are willing to make those conclusions public, or you can email me about that.   I will report back to the class with the aggregate results, but not try to single out any one student.

If you haven't ever seen The Bat and Ball Problem, you might try it first before doing your post mortem.  It might reveal some things to you.

Excel Tutorial
In light of so many students seemingly struggling with cell references on the most recent homework, I think it would be useful to go back to the Tutorial and do it again (but don't submit the key).  This is to ask yourself, whether you might have gotten more out of that exercise which would have prepared you better for the most recent homework.  As with the Experiment, you might comment on whether you got anything from the Tutorial or not and if not, why that was.

The most recent Excel homework
We'll cover that some today.  Some students are evidently struggling with the algebra that one must do to answer the questions. That is a different issue, we'll talk about ti some today.

The Blog Posts
After the post on Illinibucks due tomorrow, the next post wants you to reflect and try to connect the various posts as best as you can.  You can also use it to do a post mortem on your blogging.