Issue 27, Fall 2004

William A. McEachern, Editor

The Grapevine

In the Fall 2003 issue of The Teaching Economist, I related an exam excuse from a student who broke his leg running to get to my quiz, then two weeks later he was out of sorts during my exam because of medication he took for leg pain. I invited other notable exam excuses and published one in the Spring 2004 issue. Melissa Wiseman of Houston Baptist University reports that she received a phone call from a student a few hours before the exam. The student asked if she had seen the morning news. At 2:30 that morning the student and her 13 month-old daughter were trapped on their third floor balcony by a fire in the apartment complex. "With flames at her back, she called a young man running from the fire to come help her, and she dropped her baby over the balcony into his arms and then leapt over herself. Her baby was safe but she hit the fence and tore up her leg. She was calling me from the gurney in the emergency room waiting for emergency surgery to repair her leg. I share this with my students and tell them that if they can't make it, they had better have a better excuse than this if they don't call to let me know. By the way, she lost everything, but came back to school and is doing fine."

In the Spring 2004 issue of The Teaching Economist, I wondered how a college coach could get away with berating players in front of a national audience whereas a teacher who challenged a student's drive, even in a private setting, might be considered insensitive. Terry Liska of the University of Wisconsin-Platteville offers his insights on coaching and teaching. He tells "The Grapevine" that the most important coaching function is to assess player strengths and weaknesses. Coaches usually spend more time with players than teachers spend with students, so coaches have an assessment advantage. Both coaches and teachers should stick to the fundamentals. Identify the keys to success in a sport or a profession and focus on those skills for the season or the term. Both on the field and in the classroom less is often more. Coaches will seldom lecture on an important skill and then move on to something else. Practical applications drill the point home. Fundamentals must be demonstrated and applied repeatedly. Professor Liska notes that athletes are highly motivated, and as a group they are more receptive than is a typical class. Anger and emotion can be effective motivators, but you have to know with whom you are dealing.

Mike Tamada of Occidental College writes that there are multiple ways of instilling a drive for excellence. Angry coaches offer a popular approach but not one that we as teachers should follow. He says the red-faced, high-octane approach leads to burn out, a less stressful career, or getting fired. Quiet persuasion, an emphasis on cooperation rather than competition, and offering carrots rather than sticks represent potentially more effective techniques. Professor Tamada questions my item in the Spring 2004 issue about whether great players make great coaches I noted that only eight of the 32 NFL head coaches last season were former NFL players, only three were regular players, none was a Hall of Famer, and neither Super Bowl coach had played professionally. Professor Tamada argues that, compared to average citizens, former players are much more likely to become head coaches. But my question was whether a great pro player is more likely to become a great pro coach than is a run-of-the-mill pro player. He also argues that there are so few Hall of Famers, the fact that no coach is a Hall of Fame player sheds little light on the question of whether great players make great coaches. I count 87 Hall of Fame players under 65 years of age (http://www.profootballhof.com/hof/years.jsp). If great players made great coaches, couldn't we expect that pool of talent to produce even one head coach?

Örn Bodvarsson of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Rosemary Walker of Washburn University in Kansas explore whether parental funding of college affects a student's incentive to do well. After controlling for a wide variety of factors influencing college performance, they find through a sample of 1,300 undergraduates that those students receiving at least partial financing from their parents for tuition and books (1) failed courses more often than self-financed students, (2) were at greater risk for academic probation, and (3) earned lower GPAs. "Do Parental Cash Transfers Weaken Performance in College?" will appear in the October 2004 issue of the Economics of Education Review .

In large lecture principle courses, Mary Ellen Benedict and John Hoag of Bowling Green State find that individuals who prefer to sit near the front of the classroom had a higher probability of receiving A's. A preference for sitting in the back, regardless of whether the student did so, increased the probability of receiving a D or F. Those students unable to sit in their preferred locations and forced forward tended to receive higher grades, despite their preferences for back seats. This last finding is important because it gets around the self-selection problem that better students prefer sitting closer to the front. "Are Seating Preferences or Location in Large Lectures Related to Course Performance?" was scheduled to appear in the Summer 2004 issue of the Journal of Economic Education, which is available at http://www.indiana.edu/~econed/.

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