Issue 1, Fall 1990

William A. McEachern, Editor

Rely on Common Experience

Remember the last time you were in an unfamiliar neighborhood and had to ask for directions? Along with the directions came the standard comment, "You can't miss it!" So how come you missed it?

Teaching is much like giving directions. Your familiarity with the material is obviously essential to the task. But, as noted earlier, a longstanding familiarity can blunt your perception and reduce your ability to explain the material to a newcomer.

Some principles instructors and textbook authors try to compensate by telling all they know about a topic, but this quickly overwhelms the student with so much detail that the central point gets lost. Think of lecture material as furniture in a room. When furniture is crowded together, as in an antique shop or used furniture store, perspective is lost. Likewise, you cannot crowd your lecture with material, and then expect students to develop perspective on how the individual points relate.

Rather than tell all they know, some others offer little intuition or institutional detail, and instead take a minimalist approach, referring abstractly to goods x and y, to units of labor and capital, or, worse yet, to the elusive widget. This shorthand may work with advanced undergraduates and with other economists, but not with most principles students.

Many economists seem to overlook the fact that students arrive the first day of class with 18 years or more of experience with economic events, economic institutions, and economic choices. Students grew up in households, the central economic institution. As consumers, students become familiar with grocery stores, restaurants, movie theatres, and dozens of stores at the mall. As resource suppliers, most students have held jobs. Students also have experience with government -- taxes, speed limits, pollution controls, and public education. And they have a growing awareness of the rest of the world -- imports and exports, trade deficits, famines in Africa, and the market revolution in Eastern Europe. Students are also familiar with economic choices: should they eat at the cafeteria or pack a lunch; buy a car or use public transportation; take a course in accounting or one in history.

Thus students have abundant experience with the stuff of economics. But many instructors and principles textbooks miss the boat by not tapping into this rich lode of student experience, believing instead they must teach the student a new and different way of thinking, a way of thinking with its own set of rules and its own vocabulary. Those who teach economics as if it were a foreign language miss an opportunity to make the connection between economics and the "ordinary business of life." And because the examples introduced often do not draw on students' experience, precious class time must be used to explain them. I think examples should be self-explanatory; they should convey the point quickly and directly. Having to explain an example is like having to explain a joke. The point gets muddled.

Good direction rely on landmarks familiar to us all -- a gas station, a fork in the road, a white picket fence. Likewise, a good lecture should draw on common experience to build bridges from the familiar to the new. You should try to provide just enough intuition and institutional detail to get the point across without overwhelming the student. Start where students are, not where you would like them to be. You should try to paint graphic pictures in the students' minds, using examples that draw from students' experiences and thus need little explanation. You want to elicit from students that light of recognition, the "Aha!"

Clear and palpable examples will allow you to jump-start your presentation, pushing it farther and faster than you could relying on examples that are less obvious or more abstract. For example, resource substitution can be better explained not by referring to abstract units of labor and capital but by talking about specific labor-capital mixes, such as the alternative ways of getting a car washed: a drive-through car wash, which uses little labor and literally surrounds the car with capital, versus a Saturday morning send-the-school-band-to-Disney-World charity car wash, which uses much labor and little capital.

Presenting economics as something new to the students underplays the economic experience that students bring to the classroom. Moreover, this "economics as a foreign language" approach often confuses students into thinking that they must study economics before they can act in a way that is economically rational. But Adam Smith's invisible hand does not assume that economic actors ever heard of him or his invisible hand. Market forces exert pressure whether or not economic actors understand the laws of supply and demand. In the same sense, gravity pulls with equal force on those ignorant of Newton's principles.

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