Saturday, August 24, 2013

Finding the path

My first class session of the new semester is this upcoming Tuesday.  I've been rehearsing in my head how it will go.  Going in, my thought was to illustrate various issues with which the course is concerned in contexts which the students are already quite familiar and to extract questions from those contexts.

Since this is an upper level course, most of the students will be living in apartments rather than in university housing.  My guess is that the majority will have a roommate or several roommates.  So my thought was to first point out that there is economic activity in running an apartment - shopping, cooking, cleaning up, paying the bills, etc. - and would ask them first how that work is divided among roommates.  I suspect mainly they will say they divide it equally because that's what is fair.  Of course, economists tend to ignore fairness and instead focus on efficiency, so we might push on that for a bit and see where it leads us. 

I'll then ask a different sort of question.  Do they like to do this work or not?  If I get some kids to say that they don't like to do it, then I'll ask whether they do it nonetheless or if they shirk.  I'm hoping some will assert that they do it out of a sense of obligation to their roommates.  If I can get to that point we'll have gotten on the first day to a rather mature point about doing work within organizations, a point that doesn't come through at all in the basic model of labor supply.  We'll reenforce the point by asking if they were friends with their roommates before and, if so, what would shirking do to their friendship?  Then we'll ask for the case where they didn't know their roommates in advance if that matters for the shirking decision, or if they'd behave pretty much the same way because their roommates might become friends eventually.  To me, all of this seems like a profitable line of inquiry because, almost certainly, they have thought about these things already only not in the context of economics of organizations.

But it is not the right topic to start in on.  One must segue to it from something else, that is more obviously germane to the course.  So I thought I'd begin by discussing "the assignment problem," which is about determining those employees who do what jobs, but can be equally thought of as a more generic matching question, like finding your soul mate.   Matching is something we will reconsider later in the course.  And it is something the students also understand implicitly, though they may be hard put to say what a good matching process looks like. 

After mentioning and describing the assignment problem I can for a short time talk about and their method - having participants fill out a questionnaire and then letting eHarmony's secret algorithm find potential matches from the set of questionnaires that have been completed.   This is centralized matching.  Then I can move to decentralized matching, where the participants find one another via search.  Many markets feature decentralized matching.

But rather than talk about those markets, since it is the first day of the semester and since I want to stick with things familiar to the students, I want to talk about course registration.  The students themselves make the matches to the courses they will take, subject to some constraints, ones they will be well aware of. 

At this juncture I start to feel like I've painted myself in a corner.  The reality is that most students register without doing very much in the way of search.  For courses that are not strictly required (several alternatives would do as well to meet the particular requirement) the course title and brief description may be all they go on to determine which among the alternatives they choose.   Almost certainly, they do much more search in finding the apartment where they will live.  Not that they don't add and drop courses with great frequency.  They do.  But finding out about more detailed attributes of the courses doesn't seem to be what drives that behavior.

At least not till the semester starts.  Then they've got those first two weeks to find out what is really up.  For the instructor, that time is at once magical because it sets the stage for the rest of the term and yet also dreadful because you experience the slap in the face of those who drop and you have to find a way to accommodate those who add late.  Last night as I'm considering this I find myself getting angry at the students, though it is before the first class meeting.  Why don't they do their search ahead of time, so we can have a good fit while avoiding the disruption?  I'm stuck on this one and bothered by it. I go to bed with that on my mind.

It is remarkable what restorative powers a good night's sleep has.  This morning I recall that I plan to give my students a pre-class survey that I will alert them to tomorrow.  At the start of the survey there are a couple of questions about the course where they learned the most:

Course where you learned the most *
Please provide the rubric and number of the course you've taken in college where you've learned the most. You can also mention the course instructor if you'd like. If you are a graduate student please  only report on your courses taken here.

Explanation of Previous Response *
Give some reasons for why you learned as much as you did in this course.

Why I had the blockage last night about not linking the survey to this issue about how they search for courses, I can't say.  But once I see the connection I can no envision how I might use the survey responses to tie it to their (lack of) search behavior.  If they express strong views about what makes for good learning, wouldn't it make sense for them to try to replicate that sort of experience, so shouldn't they be looking for that?  If so, we can then discuss whether it is possible to identify that in advance or not.  At the least, I can see a path for inquiry on this question.  It might not get students to search before the semester begins the next time around, but it will expose them to some of the ideas around why it might be a good idea.  

I must also say that the subconscious is really a great problem solver.  Yesterday I was looking for a video of a Ted Talk that Norma had sent me, on how schools kill creativity.  In it there was a line about how Professors are unlike the rest of the population, because they live in their heads.  They make school in their own image, which shouldn't be because most students won't become professors.  My problem was that yesterday I couldn't come up with Sir Ken Robinson as the speaker.  I was further impeded by mistakenly believing he had at one time run the British Open University, so was confounding him with Sir John Daniel.  This morning the name Ken Robinson just popped up, as if without provocation.  I found the video almost immediately and watched it again. It is almost perfect for my class, because we can substitute the expression "human capital" for where he uses creativity and then think of it as a capacity to produce.  Students, instead, think of it as a collection of specific knowledge.   Now I plan to send the students a link to the video along with the link to the survey (and the link to the class Web site). 

I've also got a story to tell them now on learning persistence and the roll of persistence in human capital.  I can tell about being bothered when getting stuck, and developing a habit to keep at and not abandon the idea.  There is no guarantee of getting unstuck this way, so it is not a planned thing.  Being bothered is an emotional response.  I will then say I'm not really sure where it comes from, but I can make a guess.  Sometimes when I put my mind to a task I come up with something that pleases me.  After that I can let it go.  But when at other times I've reached a point where I'm stuck so not pleased, I find it harder to let go.  And then it is true that some of those times I've subsequently found a way out.  So over time I've developed a faith that it is possible to get unstuck if your persist at it.  On any one thing, I almost certainly linger in it longer than economic analysis would say is optimal, but over time by building this habit, which includes the being bothered part, I may now and then come to interesting conclusions that other people won't reach.  Who can say ahead of time what value reaching those places will have?  I do it to relieve the nervous tension at the time, not for the ultimate reward.  

With that I can feel comfortable encouraging the students to see that one big part of college is to develop similar habits in themselves.  And from there we can talk about what sort of behavior might produce those habits. 

Now I can see my way through the entire class session (some of which will be the more mundane part of going through the syllabus).  I hope the prep for later sessions isn't quite so laborious.

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