- The water contamination issue in West Virginia sounds terrible for those living in the area but it’s a gold mine for econ teachers! In addition to the obvious implications for teaching externalities and regulation, you could also use this Marketplace interview with the owner of a chain of grocery stores as a jumping-off point to talk about price controls and shortages, or demand for complements and substitutes.
- Mark Maier and I have set up a site and blog to accompany our book, The Data Game: Controversies in Social Science Statistics. In addition to a help page for instructors, we’ll be posting relevant links and examples from current events. If you teach any type of statistics course or other course that uses data, check it out!
- James Tierney’s site Teach Me Econ has some great ideas for teaching economics. He also does a podcast series about the economics classroom; the most recent is an interview with Eric Chiang, the author of the latest edition of the CoreEconomics textbook (and if you haven’t seen Eric’s Around the World in 80 Hours videos, they are pretty cool!)
I came across an interesting discussion about a 19-year-old intern who was fired from The Gazette in Colorado Springs for plagiarism. There appears to be some controversy over the fact that the editor publicly named the girl in a letter to readers (explaining and apologizing for the plagiarism), with some people saying that doing so was unduly harsh because this incident will now follow her for the rest of her career. I was intrigued by this discussion for two reasons - one, it seems pretty clear to me that this was not a case of ignorance (as I have often encountered with my own students who have no idea how to paraphrase or cite correctly) and two, putting aside the offense itself, I have often struggled with how to handle situations where there are long-term repercussions for a student, repercussions that lead the overall costs to be far higher than might seem warranted for the specific situation. As an example of the latter issue, I have occasionally taught seniors who need to p
Thanks for the shout out and thank you more for joining me today!
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