Issue 23, Fall 2002

William A. McEachern, Editor

My Biggest Teaching Goof

Running out of exams gets the heart racing, but my biggest goof so far as an instructor occurred on the first day of my career. First some background. As a student, the two economics departments I knew best, my undergraduate and graduate programs, required the intermediate micro course as a prerequisite for most undergraduate field courses in economics. Based on these two observations, I made the wrong assumption that such a prerequisite was standard practice, so in preparing my public finance syllabus, I selected a textbook and developed an outline that presumed knowledge of indifference curves. When I learned on the first day of class at the University of Connecticut that most students had not yet taken intermediate micro, I panicked and compounded my error by telling students to learn about indifference curves on their own. Bad move.

Later that day, my department head informed me that students had complained to the dean about my untimely prerequisite. As Chester A. Riley would have said, "What a revolting development this is." Anyway, before the next class I revised the syllabus, finding room in the schedule to teach students what they needed to know about indifference curves. That worked well, and I have taught the course that way ever since. But I learned that lesson the hard way.

Do you have a teaching goof you would be willing to share with colleagues, anonymously if you prefer? We can all learn from one another's mistakes. While we are on this negative bent, consider next some teaching no-nos described in John Nash's biography.

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