The Curmudgeonly Professor

On Our Way From SL City to Hobble Creek Canyon near Springville UT

 
Here's an idea of summer highway construction traffic between SL City and Provo UT

 

 
Yes, it did rain when we got to our destination in Hobble Creek Canyon, but we had an option of an indoor facility.  We attended the annual fall retreat of the finance department of the Marriott business school at BYU from which I retired eleven (11? really?) years ago.   I still miss the students but at this stage of life I am definitely not up to preparing course syllabi, exams, lectures, and enough jokes to entertain several hundred students for an entire semester.  Entrance requirements continue to rise for admission to the Marriott School as GPA's rise and only so many students can be admitted.  Sad for those who just miss the cutoff, but what else can you do?

Snowbird Trials and Tribulations Saga Continued

Ever since we got back to Salt Lake, my internet has kept blinking off and on.  And that was after making arrangements ahead of time to have it up and running, and assurances that it was doing so.  Two long phone calls the first week did not resolve the problem.  Then a two hour phone call Monday morning running through a bunch of idiotic "diagnostics" ordered by the techie on the other end of the line.  Finally he gave up and said a tech repair man would be out the next day between 9:30 a.m. and 1:30.  After sitting around all day, the repair guy showed up at 3:00 p.m.  He twiddled with the phone line outside the house a minute, turned on the modem, and presto my internet is back.

Which leads to the question:  Am I really better off with the internet?  Does my status and eternal happiness depend on being tagged in facebook?  Should I continue wasting two or three hours a day posting photos to the Curmudgeonly Professor Blog?  Is it really important to read the latest comments by my sisters?  Or should I find a new hobby?  I do not notice any diminished levels of satisfaction from people who swore off computers after retiring and banished them from their homes.  Perhaps I should stop cold turkey, stop my blogs, stop my attacks on the Tea Party on Twitter, discontinue my learned economic analysis on Twitter, discontinue comments on my grandchildren's posts on facebook, and do what?  I can only listen to talk show bloviators for so long and my ears go numb, my brain is fried, and I long for the good old days of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and FDR.  Then I remember unemployment was 25% then and the only entertainment was listening to the radio and the victrola by the light of a kerosene lamp.  Have a nice day and never, never try to transfer your internet, your telephone, your tv provider, and your mail.  Turn off your TV, turn off your computer.  A daughter of a long-time friend came with her parents to see us the other day.  She has eight kids and they are all reading stuff like the Iliad and the Odyssey and books of like manner.  I asked her how that happened.  She said "because we haven't had a TV in the house for 17 years."  Go figure.  I can see class is about over so I will let you out early today.  There will be an hour essay exam next class period on the stuff I was supposed to cover today but never got around to so be sure you read Chapters 18-35 by tomorrow and be prepared.  Nobody ever pays any attention to me in here anyway.

More Rainbows Over the Wasatch Mountains in South Salt Lake Valley

 

 

The Administration Building at Colorado State University

 When I first went to (then) Colorado A & M, the Economics Department was housed on the top floor of the Administration Building.  I started in the fall of 1954 with a master's degree in agricultural economics from Montana State at the age of 22 when I was assigned to two classes of 90 students each in introductory agricultural economics.  I was hired to do research, but the first Friday I arrived in Fort Collins my department head gave me a textbook and told me to start teaching Monday morning.  So I did.

The Economics Building at the University of Michigan in the 1950s: Photo from the Archives for February 25 2011: Memories of Ann Arbor and the U of Michigan

 
This venerable building was the home of the economics department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for several decades, including the time I was in school there from 1956-1958 and again during the 1962-1963 school year when I finished my dissertation.  This building was a durable old lady which reeked of tradition and of the ghosts of famous economists who had been at home in this structure.  Coming from the West, where we were used to having everything more than a few years old torn down and rebuilt anew, finding the reverence for old and functional buildings common in the midwest and east was a new experience.  I had an assistanthip in the Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics in which about five students were housed in one big room with our professor in the basement, second basement window from the left.  I had no idea how I ever managed to get admitted to such a prestigious economics program, but managed to compete with my classmates from the Ivy League with my University of Wyoming and Montana State academic credentials.  My first class in macroeconomics was a required course in advanced macroeconomic theory.  I had never had an introductory course in economics let alone beginning and intermediate macroeconomics.  But I was in awe of my academic surroundings, the atmosphere, the tough and world-class professors, and my congenial fellow students.

After two years of course work, we took our "prelims" or preliminary examinations.  Half of the class I entered with failed.  How I ever passed is beyond me.  The ghost of John Maynard Keynes took pity on me.  Again, of those who passed their prelims, only about half ultimately completed a dissertation successfully and received a Ph.D. degree, including some I thought were incredibly brilliant students.  Then, in the fall of 1963, after a year at the Office of the Secretary of the Treasury's Office of Tax Analysis convinced me to go back to school, I took my final oral exams for the Ph.D. in the basement room, again second from the left, where I had spent my first two years here.  Following my questioning, I was excused, only to learn that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed just a few minutes before, during my questioning.  I didn't wait until summoned back into the room, but went in anyway to inform my teachers, since several of them had served or were now serving various positions in the Kennedy Administration.  Having been in Washington working on the Kennedy Tax Cut bill just before I went back to Ann Arbor, my glee at finally getting my Ph.D. was forever dampened by the sadness of that day.

Unfortunately, this ancient building burned down a few years after I left Ann Arbor.  But my memories of a graduate degree in economics and of the brilliant professors who taught me there are forever linked to this ancient and musty building.

On the Oval on the Colorado State University Campus: Photo from the Archives for February 23 2011

 
In about 1956, I shared an office in the center of the top floor where the curve is.  My office mate had cluttered his desk with stuff, filled the pulled-out leaves with piles of papers, piled high the table behind his desk.  So one day I came in the office and he was writing on a yellow pad on his knee.  He was a labor economist; maybe that had something to do with it.  I spent 10 years at Colorado State, beginning when I was 21 and had just finished a master's degree in agricultural economics at Montana State, returning after I finished my Ph.D. prelims at Michigan, and once more after teaching at Wyoming for 9 years.  This photo was taken when I was a visiting professor at CSU during the late 80s.  But my office was no longer here.  I always loved Colorado State and Fort Collins, though I finished my career at Brigham Young.

A Tiny Slice of History: September 2, 1950

I have a cardboard box that I have used since high school to save my valued treasures.  I have hauled this box all over the United States on each of our various moves.  I don't know how many years, or decades, have gone by since I got the stuff out of the box and went through the items one by one, but it has been many years.  At the bottom of the box is a much battered page of newspaper from the Billings (MT) Gazette, dated September 2, 1950.  The page consists mostly of want ads, agricultural commodity reports, and daily comics. 

On that day in September 1950, I was 17 years old, soon to become 18 on September 17.  I had completed my freshman year of college at the University of Wyoming and had returned home to Penrose in northern Wyoming for the summer.  I was offered a job in the insurance department of the First National Bank in Powell, which was a step up from the job I had the previous summer at Earl's Super Service and Studebaker Garage right across the street, where I lubed cars, filled gas tanks, nearly pulled a gas pump over when the hose hooked on a car bumper, and learned to like ice cold bottled Coke out of the ice filled pop (never soda) chest.  At least that next summer of 1950 I could wear clean clothes to work.  My job was to type insurance policies.  If I made a mistake, the policy had to be voided and destroyed and a new one typed.  I learned to get pretty good at it.

Up until that summer, I had felt fortunate that I had been too young for World War II.  Then the world caved in once more when the Korean War started that summer.  My dad thought I should stay at the bank and make a career of banking, and was against my returning to Laramie to the University.  My bank president boss told me that I would likely get drafted soon anyway, and that I would be better off to go back to school in the meantime.  About this time in September, I went on a double date to go to the Powell Panther football game in Laurel, MT.  Then a few days later I decided that I would go back to school.  I quit my job at the bank, drove twelve miles home to Penrose, loaded up my car with what few things I had, and left as night was coming on to drive the 420 miles or so to Laramie by myself in the dark.

Here are a few gleanings from that battered page from the Billings Gazette of September 2, 1950:

• Musial of St. Louis led National League batting at .358, and led NL hits with 162.
• The best pitcher in the NL in early September was Maglie of NY at 13-3, .813
• Kiner of Pittsburgh led home runs at 40, and Ennis of Philly led RBIs with 112.
• In the American League, DiMaggio of Boston led runs with 115 and ranked 3d in hits, tied with Rizzuto of NY with 165.
• The draft situation was getting so serious that the NFL was considering raising the player limit from 32 to 35, running the risk that 4 or 5 players could get drafted the same day.
• Film star Ginger Rogers teamed with Francis X. Shields in the mixed doubles of the national tennis championships.
• In the butter and egg commodity markets, 93 score AA butter wholesaled for 62 cents, while eggs rated extras wholesaled for 44 cents.
• Russett potatoes were going for $3.50 to $3.80 per cwt.
• The Dow Jones Industrial average was 219.
• The Photo Center in Billings was advertising photo developing of 8 exp. rolls enlarged and deckled for 40 cents with extra jumbo prints at 5 cents each.
• Want ads were showing preference for men above draft age.
• Year around employment available for cattle camp.  No drinkers.
• Pinsetters wanted for bowling alley in Cody WY, pay 10 cents per line.
• Comics included Blondie, Dick Tracy, Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, Henry, The Gumps, and Orphan Annie.

Is it possible that sixty years have gone by since I put that page of newspaper in the bottom of my box, and that I have never gotten it out or thrown it away for six decades?  Time has a tendency to pay tricks on us. That one battered page brought back a flood of memories as I left my bank job, drove to Laramie so I could register the next day for classes, and began my sophomore year of school, uneasy about my future and the future of my classmates, many of whom had already left for the Korean War.  I remember it was rainy and cold in Laramie that fall, and that I was able to room with some students in a prefab room built for students who were working at the University of Wyoming Dairy Farm.  I can still recall some of the conversations I had with my friends that rainy fall as we talked far into the night, wondering about what the future had in store for us.

University of Wyoming Alumni Stickers on My Utah-Licensed Car

The University of Wyoming is not exactly beloved in Utah.  Most Utahns know nothing about the fact that UW is a fine school with many outstanding academic departments.  Funding a state university in Wyoming is expensive, relatively, in a sparsely populated state since all professional areas including law, engineering, pharmacy, and many others must be accredited.  Unfortunately, what most Utahns remember Wyoming for is the drinking, unruly behavior, and vulgar chants when BYU plays Wyoming in Laramie.  Apparently this behavior is not anything that is going to go away soon. However, I am still proud of my degree from the University of Wyoming.  My mother, my sister and my wife all graduated from Wyoming, and my oldest son is a graduate of the UW Law School.  Aside from the entertainment that putting these stickers on my car affords me when incredulous Utah types are shocked to see them, one of the other main advantages is that they help us find our car in parking lots when we can see the bright yellow ovals.  And when I long for howling winter winds, whiteout blizzards, 25 below days in January, road closures on I-80 east to Cheyenne and west to Rawlins, I take a little nostalgia trip and wish I could be back in Laramie where I spent four years as a University janitor while working my way through school.  I've always been partial to student janitors in every school where I have since taught or attended.  They are completely serious about getting an education as they work late at night and start early in the morning.  Besides, not all UW football fans are rotten.  You just wish the rotten ones would shut up.

The Main Mistakes Beginning Econ Students Made That Led to Poor Grades:

Here is a list of the main topics and terms that beginning economics students often failed to grasp, learn, recite, explain, in Econ 110:

• Supply.  A real toughie.  That's how much stuff you supply.  The more you get paid for it, the more you're willing to supply, right?  So which way does the supply curve slope?
• Demand.  How much stuff you want to buy.  Surprise.  The cheaper stuff is, the more you want to buy.  So if price is on the vertical axis and quantity demanded on the horizontal axis, which way does the demand curve slope?
• The intersection of supply and demand curves.  This is really advanced.  What happens at this point?  Quantity supplied equals quantity demanded!  Wow!
• Price elasticity.  Now students zone out here because the term seems too, too complicated.  Think rubber band.  If price goes up a bunch and you buy the same amount as before, stuff is inelastic.  Think insulin.  If price goes up a bunch and every body bails out and buys other cheaper stuff, think elastic.  Now was that so tough?
• Total spending in the economy.  C + I + G + NX.  Wow!  an Equation!  I don't do equations, you say.  C is consumption, the biggest chunk of Gross Domestic Product, I is investment, small % but mighty, G is government spending, and NX is net exports.  The sum of all this spending is Gross Domestic Product.  Was that so hard?  And yes, kiddies, a dollar spent on government spending has just as big an impact on the economy as a $ spent on a hamburger.  $1 = $1.  Politics don't matter.  A dollar is a dollar.  But try to convince the general population to whom $1 of G is $1 down the drain.  Oh my.
• Principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility.  Utility is satisfaction.  Diminishing is getting smaller.  If utility is diminishing, lo and behold, you get less satisfaction.  Or, for my slower students, just remember if you eat too many bananas, eventually you will barf.  I get this recited back to me by students who took my class 30 years ago.  They all watch the number of bananas they eat at once.

That covers our first month of econ 110, and you have mastered it in less than 5 minutes.  Yes, you do need to know this stuff for the exam.  Yes, you do need to know how to draw a supply and a demand curve.  Even on the same graph.  Yes, you do need to know that you should add C+I+G+NX to get GDP.  No, you cannot be excused from the exam to go deer hunting, get married, go home to take your laundry, play video games, go skiing, take a nap, or anything else.  If you have an appendectomy that day and you can prove you didn't fake it, you'll be excused.  If you left your textbook in Pocatello Idaho where you went for the weekend, tough.  If you think economics is just a bunch of hot air and not relevant to your blossoming career sorting debits and credits, your big mistake.  If your dad and your mom both took my class 20 years ago, just time enough for you to be born and get old enough to be a freshman, and they both told you econ was really, really tough and the worst class they ever took in college, more's the pity.  The general electorate hasn't shown a whole lot of promise in having a clue about basic economics.  If the lovebirds in the back row want to keep fooling around, please go out in the foyer.  For the rest of you, we will have a quiz tomorrow so if you spend your night playing intramural football and get 10 stitches in your head as a result, I expect to see you here bright and early at 8:00 a.m.  I promise to have a new joke to tell you then.  And no, you won't get a course evaluation form to fill out until the end of the semester.

Reasons to be Glad I am Not Teaching College Any More

Here are a few reasons I am glad that I am not teaching college any more:

• grading papers.
• writing and giving exams.
• handing out grades.
• listening to whiners and crybabies who absolutely believe they knew the material and that the tests were unfair, blah, blah, blah, and they write to the dean and call their mommas.
• when someone who took a 10 day vacation and then shows up at my office and wants me  to "review the material that they missed."  Sure.  Glad to.
• department faculty meetings.
• college faculty meetings.
• university faculty meetings.
• having someone in class raise their hand and ask "do we have to know that for the test?"  Well, no, I don't want to torture your little brain.  You don't have to know anything for the test.  But then again, you'll be taking econ 110 over again next year.  And the next.  And the next.
• students asking if we need to read the text.
• students asking if they need to take lecture notes.
• students asking if the lecture material will be on the tests or can they just read the book, sort of.
• students whose girl-boy friend dumped them the night before the test and they are emotionally distraught and need two weeks to recover.  Some sympathy here, but not much.
• students who call at 5:00 a.m. on test day to tell me they are too tired to take the exam and ask if they can postpone.
• students who want to get married on exam day and ask to postpone.
• students who want to go deer hunting on exam day and ask to postpone.l
• students who ask if they can take the exam over again since they really, really, really, knew the material.
• students who act like two year olds in a class of 400 students.
• hydraulic hand raisers who (think) they know all the answers and that everyone else is just stupid while they show off their brilliant expertise.
• students who have flunked thus far and are a starter on the famous Cougar football team and will get kicked off the team if they don't pass.  And then getting a call from their momma who tells me that Cauliflower is really, really a bright student and I'm sure you could give me a little consideration, to which I reply, Ma'am, I get many "bright students" who actually don't know anything, to which Momma slammed down the phone.  But I did hear from the athletic dept.  No pressure.  Just wondered.  Right.
• The student at Colorado State who told me her brothers (both pro football players) weren't going to like if if I flunked her.  She was actually strong enough to beat up on me herself, but fortunately that didn't happen.
• cell phones.
• texting.
• lap top computers.
• course evaluations.
• all other electronic devices

Well, this list is just preliminary and is subject to expansion.

Reason to continue teaching college:

• I miss the kids.

Band Day at University of Michigan Stadium, Early 1950s

 My lowly grad student seat was in the 98th row in the north end zone.  I attended only a couple of games while a student there, since I was way, way, way in over my head in a doctoral program for which I was ill prepared and had to learn everything from scratch which left no time for fun and games but I do remember this band day with 50 zillion high school band members.  And I remember the Little Brown Jug eatery on the edge of the main campus, which I imagine perished years ago.  And finally, this year in 2010, Big M has actually won a couple of football games and may be, we hope, headed back up where they belong.

Why oh Why Did We Ever Go Back to Wyoming and Leave Lovely Pennsylvania?

Don't bother to tell me the photo is backward.  My computer wouldn't let me turn it around, so here it is.  I never did quite figure out why I wanted to leave my cushy job at Penn State with a lovely home on the edge of a small forest on a hillside overlooking the Penn State area with spring blossoms everywhere and the bridge on Puddin' Town road where, if you hit it just right, sent the kids off their seats a foot or so in great glee and which they still remember to this day and a massive teaching assignment of one course per year and an endless flow of research funds and lunch at the Nittany Lion Inn and go back to my alma mater, the University of Wyoming, to be director of their business research bureau, and to my wife's home town, Laramie, where the wind never ceased blowing and the frost often came in late August and the flowers only briefly bloomed and the snow piled up against the corners of the house while the wind whistled and howled like Banshees and gave up the fall foliage and the trips to Niagara Falls and New England.  I've never quite figured out why we did.  But then, there was family.  And, at the time, that meant more to us than a cushy job in a prestigious department.  But I'll never know if it was the right decision, because we can never assess the "what ifs" in our lives, can we?  We can only take it as we lay it out and proceed down the road to wherever we want to go or whatever we want to do next.

Cluttered Desktop in my Office at Penn State early 1960s

I have seriously (seriously) tried to become neater over the past half century but, regrettably, no visible progress has yet been made.

About Literature: Back to School from About.com

Sail Away...

I don't always like to think about it, but lots of us are heading back to school--elementary, middle, high school, college, and the school of life. It's all a never-ending adventure in learning when you are enamored with literature. But, this time of the year sets a tone, makes me remember that I need to pursue my course of reading and thinking (regardless of whether a teacher is standing over me).

But, oh, think of those days...

Do you remember all of those first days of school? Every year, I'd get that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Then, after a few days, the school routine would kick in... What are your memories of heading back to school? In An Old Man's Thought of School, Walt Whitman writes,

"An old man's thought of school,
An old man gathering youthful memories and blooms that youth itself cannot.
Now only do I know you,
O fair auroral skies--O morning dew upon the grass!
And these I see, these sparkling eyes,
These stores of mystic meaning, these young lives,
Building, equipping like a fleet of ships, immortal ships,
Soon to sail out over the measureless seas,
On the soul's voyage."

Join our discussion: Back-to-School Memories. Then, take a look at how to succeed in literature. And, read How To Study.

via my.yahoo.com

Where I Graduated from High School in Powell WY in 1949

This school building housed Powell High School in Powell WY, a town that might have had 3,500 people more or less when I graduated in 1949 at age 16.  Since then Powell has gone through another high school and is now housed in a brand-new high school complex just east of town.  However, I still like this version of high school, a building long since razed, but still replete with haunting memories of classmates, school paper, senior annual, FFA, and, occasionally, a class.