voluntaryXchange

FOH for FMOOWMP (Office Hours)

Students have big trouble with this … especially early in their college careers.

Hat tip to these two pieces from NPR on how to overcome your fear of office hours, and how office hours are particularly foreign to students from rural areas.

Cross-posted from SUU Macroblog, which is required reading for my macroeconomics classes.

The Insanity of High School Class Scheduling

Does it seem like your kid’s class schedule for high school was designed by monkeys?

I am in my 7th and last year of dealing with this. I put everything into Google Calendar so the family has access to the whole thing if they need it. It takes over 2 hours to do this. Here’s why.

The school has A and B days. Fair enough. That would be easy to enter into a schedule.

But … those alternate days of the week: so A days are MWF one week, and TT the next. So that doubles the amount of data entry.

But … … the beloved American 3 day weekend makes that worse. Someone requires that those days off be evenly split between A and B days. Practically, this means that several times during the year an ABABA is followed by an ABABA instead of a BABAB. That adds several special cases that have to be fixed individually.

But … … … our schools came up with the wonderful idea of late-in Wednesdays — because — you know — kids and teachers go to school too much. So there’s a different schedule for those days too, and they’re A’s and B’s too. Let’s use lower case letters for those. So, the basic week is either ABaBA or BAbAB.

But … … … … that’s not the end either. We have two teacher conference weeks each year. These are done on a short day schedule, but not the same short day schedule that they use for Wednesdays all year long. Some dim bulb decided it had to be a different one. So now we have the possibility of not ABaBA or BAbAB but the somewhat shortened ABaBA or BAbAB.

But … … … … … it still gets worse, because during those conference weeks, when they do a short A and B day, they also do Wednesdays that are both short and different. Let’s call those α and ß, so really we have ABαBA or BAßAB.

So, a student or parent, for each week, if it happens to be a full 5 day week, still needs to know if it’s an ABaBA or BAbAB or ABaBA or BAbAB. Google has the ability to repeat those, but because there are so many special cases, the longest pattern in the entire year is 8 instances, which occurs for MF and TT schedules for 4 pairs of consecutive weeks in early spring. Here’s what it ends up looking like over the 37 week school year:

AbAB (School starts on Tuesday, rather than Monday)

ABaBA

BAbAB

AbAB (Same pattern repeated, but Monday off)

ABaBA

BAbAB

ABαBA (Shorter days this week, with a different Wednesday)

BAbAB

ABaBA

BAbAB

AbAB (Same pattern repeated, but Monday off)

ABaBA (Repeating last week’s schedule over 5 days)

BAbAB

ABaBA

BAbAB

AB    (Three days off for Thanksgiving)

ABaBA (Repeating last week’s schedule over 5 days)

BAbAB

ABaBA (Followed by 2 weeks off for Christmas)

BAbAB

ABaBA

AbAB (same pattern repeated, but Monday off)

BAbAB

ABαBA (Shorter days this week, with a different Wednesday)

BAbAB

AbAB (same pattern repeated, but Monday off)

ABaBA (Repeating last week’s schedule over 5 days)

BAbAB

ABaBA

  bAB (Two random days off for the teachers)

ABaBA (But not repeating the last week on a 5 day schedule)

BAbAB

ABaBA (followed by a week of vacation)

BAbAB

ABaBA

BAbAB

ABaBA

BAbAB

The school has problems with attendance. I wonder if it has anything to do with the students not knowing where they’re supposed to be?

BTW: I need to know the schedule so I can manage rides (our school has not buses at our distance). I have 3 different pick-up times, and 3 different drop-off times. That’s an improvement over last year.

It gets worse. Our local school district does zero coordination with the universities within the state. We are mostly on MWF and TT teaching schedules. Also, while our Christmas breaks overlap, as well as our three day weekends, Spring Break does not, nor do the 2 shorter vacations the kids get off for no reason I can think of.

*************************

I strongly suspect almost all of this is a problem created by legislators and accreditors who require a fixed number of class periods or hours (rather than a more flexible range), and by unions that tweak the schedule to create more time off for members.

Research Productivity: Your Grad School vs. Your Job School

Publish or perish: but do you publish because of where you were trained or where you work?

This paper does a matched pair analysis (yeah for that technique) on science Ph.D.’s from 1970 to 2011. Here’s what they found:

For two people who land jobs at the same place:

• The one from the more prestigious graduate school gets more cites
• But neither publishes significantly more papers.

For two people who come from the same graduate school:

• The one who lands the job at the more prestigious school gets more cites, and
• Publishes more papers.

In short, it’s where you work that counts, not where you went to school. Of course, the problem is how to land that plumb job when they seem to go mostly to the people from the better schools.

The authors then eliminate pre-hire productivity, departmental expectations, and retention as explanations. This leaves facilitation of research by departments as the prime explainer of productivity differences.

What they find there (in their Model 1) is that departmental prestige, faculty size, and number of Ph.D. students per faculty member are the big factors in explaining productivity of the faculty.

The message for young faculty is get to the best department you can, and stay there. In the longer term, you probably can’t do much to make it more prestigious, but bigger is better.

N.B. Yep, pretty much the opposite of what I did.

Hat tip to Cold Spring Shops.

When They Can’t Read or Count

In academics, publishing is a big deal. There’s an aphorism about administrators though: they can’t read, but they can count. What this means is the quantity of your research often outweighs the quality (this is very true inside most institutions, but less true when looking across institutions for a new job).

Anyway, I just saw something I’ve never seen before. This was in an authors’ footnote of a paper that recently came out:

Joshua B. Miller is Associate Professor of Economics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia. Adam Sanjurjo is Associate Professor of Economics, University of Alicante, Spain. Both authors contributed equally, with names listed in alphabetical order. Their email addresses are Joshua.Benjamin.Miller@gmail.com and sanjurjo@ua.es. [emphasis added]

An authors’ footnote typically appears on the first page of the paper. I have never seen the emphasized text appear in print.

It points to a further problem of academic administrators. I was taught that, except for rare exceptions, authors should be listed alphabetically by last name. Unfortunately, some administrators default to giving more weight to authors listed earlier.

(On a personal note, I had a dean who did this. It was a constant struggle, and honestly, I think he devalued all my work because with the last name Tufte my name was always near the end).

I suspect that these authors face the same problem. So they are wasting a little bit of journal space and a little bit of the reader’s attention.

I hope this non-Coasian solution works.

The paper is:

Miller, Joshua B., and Sanjurjo, Adam, “A Bridge from Monty Hall to the Hot Hand: The Principle of Restricted Choice,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2019, 33, 144-162.

Why Is Macro So Hard? Marx, Engels, and Plato

The Open Syllabus Project tracks over 100K college syllabuses to see which texts are used.

At number 3 is The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (this is the shorter, more political than economic book, that is often paired with readings from the 3 volumes of Marx’ Capital).

WTF.

My guess is that this may be the primary exposure to economics that many students get.

An analogy would be if Paley was read by far more students than Darwin.

This is not to say that Marx wasn’t a great economist. He definitely recognized and discussed the big unsolved or unaddressed problems of his day. But that was half to 2/3 of the way back to Adam Smith. A lot has happened since then. That’s like contemporary chemists reading Priestley: old, seminal on some points, and woefully wrong and out of date on others.

And Marx’ labor theory of value, his core idea, was a failed attempt at explaining the paradox of value. An important aspect of why it failed is that he came up with an answer before others did, that was later shown to be flawed by the marginal revolution. In most fields, that would be called a valiant attempt, with emphasis on the attempt part.

And yet, I have never, ever, had an incoming student at any level who could explain why it was wrong. This makes me think that while # 3 is being covered a lot, an essential part of the story is being left out.

In context, Marx is best thought of as a low and thick branch on the tree of economics knowledge. It was a worthwhile direction to go as the field explored new directions. But when it didn’t work out, economics as we now understand the field to be, backed out of that branch and went down the others, and flourished.

At number 2 is Plato’s Republic. OK. I’ll give on this one. It’s a great and seminal piece of social thought. But I wonder how many students get through as much of it as they can and come out the backside understanding that it doesn’t have much to do with democracy, republics, and elections as they’ve come to understand them?

In an event, as an economist, I find this work to be blissfully unaware that decentralized exchange is important or worthwhile. And yet understanding of decentralized exchange is what economics is all about.

A case in point is the prisoners’ dilemma. It wasn’t until halfway through the 20th century that a couple of mathematicians hit on a fundamental problem for understanding economics: optimal choices do not always lead to optimal outcomes. Plato knew nothing of this when he considered the best government to be that of an all-wise and all-knowing philosopher king, who made nothing but optimal choices.

So why is macro so hard? Because these authors are blithering idiots on the subject of what we now call economics, or on the subject of economics as presented in the news every day. If this is informing students’ viewpoints on some topics, no wonder they find what we do difficult.

I’ll even update my analogy. Paley was at least talking about some of the same things as Darwin. Better yet would be Origen and Augustine, discussing diversity without any conception of the random part of random selection producing it. That’s what teaching Marx, Engels, and Plato is doing to college students.

How Management and Data Work

Last time I checked, the major weakness of decision making based on data was … making up the data you don’t know, and then not doing sensitivity analysis of those assumptions:

Wait … what? Don’t I know and love a certain university whose Provost did this with a policy change about increasing online enrollments?

From the January 7, 2016 Dilbert.

Should We Say Goodbye to Confucius Institutes?

Confucius Institutes were billed as a way to engage China in the American education of the students they send here.

It seems it’s the kind of engagement some schools didn’t want in the first place.

The report from NAS recommends that universities close their Confucius Institutes. “Confucius Institutes permit an agency of a foreign government to have access to university courses, and on principle that is a university function,” Rachelle Peterson, the author of the report, said in an interview. “Institutions should have full control over who they hire, over what they teach, and Confucius Institutes basically act like class-in-a-box kits that come ready-made for universities to use.”

Ooh. Class-in-a-box kits is exactly the sort of thing that administrators love, and professors decry as just not that easy (or useful). Of course, that can even more top down, as legislators increasingly discover that education is more expensive than they told themselves. The National Association of Scholars advocates shutting down these academic get rich quick schemes.

My school has a Confucius Institute. Of course, we’re not large or particularly pathbreaking, so we were late to the game.

Hmmm.

Best Paragraph I Read Today

Tyler, of course, discussing the college admissions scandal:

In this case, those charged are mostly wealthy Americans of high social status, not gangsters. They probably thought of themselves as law-abiding Americans, with exceptions so minor as to be negligible. In other words, this case illustrates what a low opinion America has of its system of higher education. As a university professor, I would feel much better if it had been mobsters charged with these alleged crimes.

I would add that, here in flyover country, a lot of the rich bicoastal population is already regarded as mobsters. Thus, Trump: a rich, bicoastal, who probably is a mobster.

Its Evidence of Poor Teaching ;-D

Carpe Diem notes that Monday is National Grammar Day, and shows some evidence from basic Google searches. I’ll go one better and show Google Ngrams. Not every one of Mark Perry’s searches shows up, but some do.

Exhibit B: A Google search finds more than 17,000,000 results for the incorrect phrase “at it’s best.”

Here’s my Google Ngram take on that:

Exhibit C: A Google search for the incorrect phrase “it’s fullest” finds more than 700,000 results.

Surprisingly, that one was popular way back when, but it is on the increase of late:

Exhibit D: Do a Google search for “in it’s own right,” and you’ll also get more than 900,000 results.

All of these are generally on the rise since 1960, and after a little dip in the 80’s, most have increased drastically since then.

Do note that these ngrams are shown in percentages of words/phrases used, so they are scaled for increases in publications.

I suggest that this is prima facie evidence that our grammar has gotten worse, and further that the temporal correlation across all three shows that this is a society-wide breakdown in the teaching of grammar.

Word Tip # 26a: Update On Pasting Photos Into Table Cells

I wrote in Word Tip # 26 about pasting photos into table cells (I use this for seating charts for class).

My PC got an upgrade in October. My earlier tip did not work. I actually spent several minutes on Google searches to figure out why, but I came up empty-handed. Many people suggest what I had done before.

But it was failing for some, so it’s not just me.

Towards the end of this thread, I came upon a workaround that was quick and easy for me.

1. Do follow the old tip, which amounts to fixing the size of the cells in the table.
2. Paste the oversize photos into the table, and don’t worry about them.
3. When you are done pasting, resize one, by right-clicking on it to bring up a context menu, and then choosing Size and Position.
4. Without doing anything else, go to the next photo, and click F4, which repeats the last action. Repeat as needed.