My Moral Compass and Some Observations about Our Class

Today in class in discussing ideas behind the blog posts on punishment and getting an under-performing employee back up to speed, we briefly discussed the notion of moral compass.  If a person is guided that way, what interventions might then make sense, as the person likely will punish himself for the poor performance.   I'm going to do a bit of that in this post.

First, you might listen to this video, a famous song by B.B. King.  It captures my current mood about teaching our class.

The explanation for why I feel this way is simple enough.  I don't see connections that students in the class should be making to what I'm trying to teach.  The metaphor is the lightbulb going off in your head.  Evidence of that happening might be found in your blog posts or in your comments in class.  But it largely doesn't seem to be happening, as far as I can tell.

I'm quite willing to accept the blame for this outcome.  A younger teacher, one more in tune with the issues that are important in your lives, almost certainly would cast the course quite differently - both subject matter and method of instruction.   That said, I would be interested to know whether you are connecting well with the material in some of your other courses.  I'd appreciate a comment on this post or in an email if that's the case for you.

Also, in some ways I'm a pretty stubborn person.  The previous offering of the course, in 2017, did have some incentive built in for students to attend class which was there for about 3/5ths of the course.  After the incentive was taken away, attendance dropped off precipitously.  So, in some sense that many students in the class have made it essentially a distance learning course is not a surprise.  My stubbornness fits in here in that I really did want you to grasp the importance of working in a collegial environment - what we have been referring to as gift exchange - and learn this not just cognitively but experientially as well.   And in my view of how you should learn, your experiences precede my interventions, which are mainly about your reflections on those experiences. For our class the biggest gift you could offer would be to attend regularly and then participate in class discussion.  Wanting that as a goal, I focused only on it, and not at all on how to get from here to there.  If I got you to attend class by requiring it and taking attendance, it no longer would be a gift.  It would just be another hoop you'd have to jump through. So I simply hoped the lesson could be learned without providing the incentive.  It's quite apparent now that was wishful thinking.

--------

This mea culpa leads to an obvious question - how should the course play out for the remainder of the semester.  Let me note that the Syllabus is a kind of contract.  Also, I signed an Offer Letter about teaching the class that the Econ Department sent me.  That is also a contract.  I will honor these contracts as best as I can, but I do want to make some changes that seem fitting under the circumstances.

1.  Since so many students are missing class discussion and thus not connecting the homework to the subject matter in a way I'd hope to see, I will instead make a video before each class, I hope no more than 15 minutes, maybe less, which will present the ideas as presentation, not as dialogue as I've been trying to do in class.  The video will be available to everyone, so in that sense the incentive to come to class will be even less.

2. I'm planning on Thursday to treat the live class session like office hours.  In office hours, the students drive.  If they have questions about the Excel homework, we'll review that.  If they have questions about the video, those can be addressed.  And if they have questions about anything else in the course, for example, the next Moodle quiz is next week, we'll talk about that.   We'll go as long as students have questions they want to have answered.

3.  I'm going to take a wait and see approach after that.  If the session seems effective, we might repeat the approach.  I would also be willing to entertain other suggestions of how to conduct class sessions, recognizing that we are now well into the semester.

---------

We talked in class today somewhat about emotions and people underperforming because they feel aggrieved in some way.  The last few weeks I've been alternating between being sad about our class and being angry about it.  I used to think that my unusual methods (at least for teaching economics) were sufficient to address the various issues you face as students.  Now it is clear that the methods are not enough, are possibly wrong headed, and further that I simply lack the energy I had a few years ago, where that might have been an important factor in pulling this off.   The truth is that now I want the semester to be over and to focus on other things.  Let's try to get there as best as we can.