Michael O'Hare writes:
The Reality-Based Community: Serve fewer courses to nourish more; let the diners in the kitchen and give them aprons.: Bob Frank exhibits the factor most highly correlated with student evaluations of teaching, which is manifest enthusiasm for his subject matter.... Modern psychology has boiled down being really smart to a couple of core traits. One is knowing a lot about a lot of different things; the other is being wired up so these different things jump out of their usual cognitive boxes and connect in unusual ways. Frank is smart in this way, so his exploration connected his experience with learning languages and his general education knowledge of why male and female albatrosses look alike while bull and cow seals don't.
The result is three very solid insights, consistent with a lot of what others are discovering about how people learn. The first is the difference between (i) recall and repetition of a recipe, formula or fact on cue and (ii) really knowing something. The second is the principle articulated by Bob Behn thus: "If you're teaching someone to use a computer, you should never touch the computer." The third is the difference between the few important basic principles that experts use all the time without realizing it, and the many abstruse and frontier-pushing results they get with them.
Put these together and you get a teaching model with:
- A few big ideas, looked at from many directions and dressed up (but not hidden) in many guises.
- Students getting their hands dirty using these ideas to solve problems they know they have (this is always better than letting the ideas look like new problems they didn't want).
- Displacement of the concept of being right by the concept of being useful (Nelson Goodman explains this in Ways of Worldmaking).
The central exercise of such a course is to assign the students the role of naturalist (this is where the birds and seals come in): Find a situation that surprises you, that you can understand better (or even explain completely) using the core concepts of economics. Your explanation doesn't have to be complete, or even right, but it has to be interesting and reasonable. Five hundred words, once in the middle of the semester and again at the end.
I have generalized his exercise this spring in my introduction to public policy course to a "policy naturalist" assignment with excellent results (though I'm not sure I did such a good job of distilling the course down to fewer big ideas and less showoffy arcana), and I intend to do the same next fall in an introductory probability and statistics course. This model really has legs.
The result of Bob's experiment is, obviously, a drawer full of these exercises, which he has assembled into a book... The Economic Naturalist, and if you're not putting on your coat to repair immediately to your local physical bookstore, or mousing over to your favorite online merchant to buy it, you are reading the wrong blog.
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