About Me
Today, I am combining my love for economics + my love for teaching economics to create, what I hope, is a useful resource. Today, I am an average consumer living in the most expensive state in the Union, trying to figure out how to make sense of the crazy, occasionally illogical things I see around me. And today, I am passing on some of those observations to you, dear reader.
You’ll find no PhD here. I have a Master’s Degree in economics, though my love for the subject was nearly derailed by a too-smart professor early in my academic career. My first econ course was taught in a way that surely made the professor feel superior, but unfortunately made the rest of us feel like dunces (in other words, the instructor could not make the subject material relevant to a class full of confused and intimated 18 and 19 year olds). I felt like such a dummy. I hated the class and barely squeaked by with a ‘C’.
After my initial foray into the field, imagine my dismay at learning that I was required to take another econ course to fulfill my international business degree. Well holy hippy love! This professor had hair down to his shoulders and wore a bandana, Rambo-style to class every day and spoke so passionately about the Economies of Less Developed Nations (yes, it left such an impact that I remember the precise title of course) that I was hooked. Suddenly, everywhere I looked I saw economics. Remember all those fast food restaurants that started serving “snack wraps”? BAM! Economics. Or perhaps you remember getting a discount for being a student (or a kid) at the movie theater (wait for it…) BAM! Economics. Without warning, I found a field that made total sense to me and I was captivated.
Real World Application
Fast forward a few years and I was back in the classroom. Nope, not as a student; by this time I had earned my Master’s and moved to bright and sunny Hawaii (cliché alert: the student had become the master…) and cinched a job teaching at a community college in Honolulu. On my first day of teaching to a roomful of frightened 18 and 19 year olds, I relayed the story of my not-so-successful first course in economics, how I eventually found my stride, and how I hoped to leave them with some pertinent information to help them to be more engaged and informed consumers.
More than my captivation with the field of economics, I discovered my passion for teaching economics. Not only was I able to provide relevant, real world examples, but I was probably the most excited person in the classroom when I could see students get it. I can’t describe how rewarding it was to witness those moments. And I loved it. I made up dances to describe theories (looks a little like raising the roof and just repeating “price ceiling, price floor” over and over again…video to come), brought in examples ripped from the their hometown headlines, and was the bane of my department’s existence for refusing to emphasize lofty and complicated theories, but instead favored real world application. After all, most of my students were not interested in pursing economics, but instead were required to be there (I asked). What good is it to teach a subject in a way that’s simply not useful outside of the classroom? Why can’t everyone who’s willing (or required) to put in some time, walk away with some basic concepts to help them to be a more informed consumer? Between all this teaching, I was launching a business that soon outpaced not only the lowly salary of a lecturer, but also overtook the increasingly limited time I had to devote to make the course meaningful, closing the door on my teaching career.
(Though in a made for TV movie kind of twist, I ran into two of my students a few years after they took my course. Both had switched their major to economics, which, no joke, got me all kinds of teary.)
