Here is this miserable, disastrous economic and financial disaster haunting the U.S. and the world, and I can't be in the classroom with 400 eager, excited, entranced college students expounding, discussing, and arguing with them about what is going on today. One thing about it, once college students start recognizing that they may have a tough time finding a job when they graduate, economics finally gets their attention. Fortunately, we didn't yet have those atrocious classroom annoyances like texting and Facebook when I quit teaching, so at least I didn't have to deal with that distraction.
If you are a math teacher, the procedure for calculating a derivative in calculus is probably not going to change from something that happened in the morning news. Or if you are a history teacher, there are likely to be no new generals discovered in the Civil War over the weekend, even though research and scholarship continually provide new perspectives and ideas about how history evolved and who did what. But economics is another matter, especially macroeconomics, economic policy, and money and banking. And you had better show up in class informed about what is going on that very day if you want to be credible.
I always required my students to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and bring it to class each day. I spent one entire class period at the beginning of the semester going through the Journal section by section, and showing them how to read the financial pages. Of course, I warned them about the editorial pages where the left-hand editorial columns were always consistently strongly biased, but encouraging them to read all of the op-ed pieces which were nicely balanced among all economic and political perspectives. We could usually find something in the paper that dealt with wherever we were in the course at the time. Students often told me that they thought this little exercise was one of the most important things they learned in college, and that this exercise made their other classes easier and more understandable.
I started my teaching career long ago teaching, you will be amazed, courses in agricultural economics, including farm management and land economics. I couldn't manage a farm if my life depended on it, but farm management was all about microeconomics, or economics of an individual entity like a farm or a business. I then gravitated toward general economics, where I taught at least a dozen and a half different courses over the years. I liked teaching transportation economics until the deregulation era and then about two-thirds of the material was extinct when you couldn't spend two weeks on the Interstate Commerce Commission or on airline and waterway regulation. I also taught courses in public finance, state and local finance, natural resource economics, consumer economics, and research methodology.
My favorite courses, though, were economics principles courses to large sections of beginning students as well as macroeconomics and money and banking to upper level students and MBA students. My all time favorite course, though was a readings course for MBA students where we worked through 12 books in a semester. Many students told me that, although they didn't have time to study anything else that semester, they learned more of value about the real world of business and management than they did in their other, more clinical and analytical, courses because they had to think for themselves about why decisions were made and how people could have been so brain dead and stupid.
Most of all, I miss the students. It has taken me a few years to miss the miserable, argumentative ones, and the ones who complained so much at home that their mommy and daddy showed up in my office to tell me I had prevented Junior from playing football, going into accounting, becoming a medical doctor, graduating, or one hundred and one other things. Parents, increasingly, were becoming obstructionists in the teaching and learning process. Students, increasingly, were becoming confrontational, believing firmly they were entitled to a higher grade. Grading was continually being "dumbed down" with everyone seemingly having the right to be uniformly excellent. No more "good, better, and best" like the old Monkey Ward Catalogue. But teaching is still the best profession in the world. No where else is there quite the same opportunity to experience the exhilaration that comes from learning and opening one's mind to the world and what is in it.
