At this moment you may be thinking, "So what's this? Should I toss it now or read on?" I estimate that I have about ten seconds to get your attention. Here's the story: This newsletter is aimed at making your teaching, particularly your teaching of economic principles, more effective and more enjoyable.

Some of us get a bit defensive when the subject of our teaching comes up -- the same way we might react if someone were to talk about our driving. Your first reaction might be, "I'm a pretty good teacher." But could you benefit from more teaching ideas? Or perhaps you are thinking, "Why should I worry about my teaching since quality teaching is not appreciated around here?" Even if the quality of your teaching is not appreciated (though certainly it's valued by your students), you should want to improve because teaching interested students if more fun and more rewarding. If you do not enjoy teaching as much as you once did, if your classes remind you at times of the movie "Dawn of the Dead," or if you simply believe you are not doing as good a job as you could, you might benefit from this newsletter.

As new faculty members, we learned early that professional standing is usually based more on research and publishing than on teaching. Yet teaching is what most academic economists do most of the time, even though most were poorly prepared to teach. Sure, many of us served apprenticeships as graduate assistants, but most of us received little actual advice, formal or informal; we had to fee our way. Since then many of us have gone on to accumulate years of teaching experience. This experience is valuable and should not be underestimated. As Emerson wrote, &The years teach much which the days never know." At the same time, the years take a toll. Bad habits often become hidebound. Moreover, after years of teaching, many instructors have difficulty approaching a topic with fresh eyes. Familiarity dulls one's perception. In the same manner, you may no longer "see" nor could even describe pictures that have been hanging on your walls for years.

Thus, regardless of experience, most of us as teachers are still underachievers. We could benefit from ideas that could make our teaching more enjoyable and more effective. To have good ideas about teaching, we need lots of ideas. This newsletter will provide a forum for teaching ideas. In this first issue I would like to share with you some teaching ideas that are the product of nearly 20 years in the classroom. For some of you, this newsletter will provide new insights; for others it may simply remind you of things you already know or once knew. As Will Rogers said, ""None of us is smart enough to remember all we know." If you would like to take issue with what I have to say, or if you have developed ideas that you believe make teaching more interesting and more fun, consider sharing your thoughts through this forum.

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.

This is obvious, but success is a study of the obvious. To have something good to say, you must build up an account from which to draw. You become a powerful lecturer when what you say is just the tip of the iceberg of what you know. Gather information -- from journals, textbooks, newspapers, magazines, and newscasts -- ranging from the price of Big Macs in Moscow to the cost of the savings and loan bailout. Your problem is how to digest this information and how to incorporate it into your class presentations.

Economics may be centuries old, but it is new every day. Each new day offers economic evidence that can be used to support or revise evolving economic theory. Bring together the old and the new to have something good to say. You draw lecture material from your reading, from research, from conversations with colleagues, from reflections in the check-out line, from wherever. If you haven't done so already, you should start an "evidence file." When you come across material that could be used to enrich your lectures, place it in your evidence file. When preparing your course, sort this material by topic to be worked into your lectures where appropriate. Some material for your evidence file is provided at the end of this newsletter.

The key to saying it well is to generate and sustain student interest. Alfred North Whitehead noted, "There can be no mental development without interest."

So how do we generate and sustain interest? When possible, open your lecture with a hook -- a question, a problem, a controversy, an outrageous statement -- something to get students' attention. Don't read from your notes. The students' interest and zest for learning is sapped when lectures are reduced to the routine transmittal of predigested information. Such lectures often amount to a process by which the instructor's notes become the students' notes without passing through the brains of either. As Juvenal said two thousand years ago, "That cabbage hashed up again and again proves the death of the wretched teachers." Another problem with reading from notes is that to do so you must stand in one place: at the podium. Your presentation will be more dynamic if you are free to move around. So move around, but don't pace (walking back and forth like a caged tiger can have the same numbing effect on students as standing in one place).

Interest flows from variety -- variety in the types of material presented and in the way material is presented. Your presentations could include theory, facts, statistics, graphs, anecdotes, examples, analogies, questions, opinions, discussion, and other approaches. Vary both the pitch of your voice and, on occasion, your volume. The best voice is your natural speaking voice with all the modulation and variance you normally have. For some reason, certain instructors turn on a "stage voice" when they step in front of a class; this stage voice is louder, more monotone, and often more irritating than their normal voice.

Enthusiasm is your best ally for generating and sustaining student interest -- an enthusiasm for the material, for the students, and for your ability to get things across. Enthusiasm is the oil that lubricates the machinery of teaching. An average speaker fired with enthusiasm can be more persuasive and more arresting than can a skilled orator without it. Emerson wrote, "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." Your presentation should be bold, aggressive, animated. You must demonstrate an interest in what you are saying. Pepper your presentation with evidence from common experience to reinforce the point in question.

The great orator Demosthenes, when asked to list the three most important qualities of public speaking replied, "Action, action, and action!" The color and animation of your language are evidence of action, but your nonverbal actions often speak louder than words. Direct your nonverbal action in positive ways. Students are able to sense how organized you are. Send the message that you are in control. Get to class on time; be prepared, organized, and alert. Put your outline of the day's lecture on the left-hand side of the blackboard. This gives the lecture more organization and provides students with a handy guide. Gestures are a form of body language that reveal mental activity and convey your interest and enthusiasm for the topic. Gestures can also be an effective way to reinforce a point, such as with the sweep of an arm. Your gestures should appear comfortable and spontaneous, not planned and artificial.

Economists have many sources of possible humor -- economic expressions, economic events, examples, or just plays on words. For example, consider the word util: a unit of utility is so dry it nearly sticks in the throat. I tell students they can think of utils as "jollies," as in "getting your jollies" from consumption. Consider some other amusing alternatives: "thrills," "kicks," or "yayas." You can show some felicity in your choice of examples, such as for goods (Hostess Twinkies, pickles), firms (an all-night bait and doughnut shop), occupations (toll-taker at a no-change booth). How about a rock group called Guns 'N' Butter? You can probably do better than these. My point is that humor is very much a part of life. Economics does not have to be serious business. If you're still at the stage where you believe referring to widgets is a riot, perhaps you need to lighten up.

• The revolution in Eastern Europe has uncovered the deplorable environmental conditions in many of these countries. In Poland, for example, half of the bodies of water are reportedly too polluted even for industrial use, and East Germany has been called an environmental disaster area. It is ironic that these once socialist systems apparently did a worse job protecting the public from pollution than more market-oriented systems.

• Trading goods across national borders is much easier than trading services. After all, we can't import haircuts from Taiwan. This in part explains why jobs at General Motors, but not jobs at McDonald's, have been lost to imports. Yet international sales of services is growing. When Americans vacation overseas, they consume services produced by foreigners. To reduce costs, some U.S. insurance companies now fly their claim forms by overnight pouch to countries such as Ireland, where the paperwork is processed and flown back to the United States.

• Students usually seem interested in the fortunes of the rich and the famous. Forbes Magazine (Oct 1, 1990) has ranked entertainers by combined income for 1989 and 1990 as follows:
  
  
  1. Bill Cosby: $115M
  2. Michael Jackson: $100M
  3. The Rolling Stones: $88M
  4. Steven Spielberg: $87M
  5. New Kids on the Block: $78M
  6. Oprah Winfrey: $68M
  7. Sylvester Stallone: $63M
  8. Madonna: $62M
  9. Arnold Schwarzenegger: $55M
  10. Charles Schulz ($54M)

• Speaking of money, Forbes (July 25, 1990) identifies Taikichiro Mori as the second richest person in the world as of 1990. He is a retired economics professor who earned nearly $15 billion by wisely anticipating the skyrocketing value of real estate in Japan. Mori might be a good answer to the amusing question, "If economists are so smart, why aren't they rich?"