Debating Books

During the past two weeks I have been reading spousonomics and next I will start reading The Invisible Hook: the hidden economics of pirates. I may assign one or the other to my Econ 106 next Fall.
After reading both books the question I need to ask will students be more interested in the married life or piracy?

For a long time now I have been thinking of taking a drawing class to improve my teaching. I imagined drawing pictures that tell stories for students and gets them engaged in the lesson similar to what is done in the video below. But I ran across a website called Behaviorgap.com which does the same thing but with very little artistic ability (picture above).


Double-dip recession from Marketplace on Vimeo.

Excitement Today

This Hawk showed up today in the middle of my lecture and the students were excitied by seeing him there. I watched students who were forcing themselves to stay awake wake up in an instant. Was it the surprise element or the fact that something real was in front of them?

Diminishing Marginal Utility Experiment

Yesterday, I conducted the Chocolate experiment with my class. On Monday I gave them the lecture on Jeremy Bentham,  Utility and Marginal Utility. Most of them accepted the idea as presented and said "that makes sense"!
On Wednesday (yesterday) I conducted the experiment but made sure the result would not match the results as presented in the lecture. I gave them a variety of chocolate so that the Marginal Utility would not fall. To my surprise the students picked up on this and criticized my experiment (see the end of the first video).


After this first round, I ran the experiment as it was meant to be run. I gave all of the credit to the students and the experiment worked out as Jeremy predicted.