Stylistically, the way I've taught my Economics of Organizations class is quite different from the way other undergraduate economics classes are taught. The students who end up taking the class become well aware of these differences. By and large, they have expressed appreciation for the alternative approach. Many students who register for the class are not aware of the style difference at the time they register. My approach may end up being more work for them than in their other classes. Consequently, some of them end up dropping the class, either during the first 10 days of the semester, when they can still add a different course, or somewhat later, when they begin to fall behind in the work and would prefer having fewer credit hours to focus on.
The Economics Department is somewhat aware of my alternative approach. Each year they ask for a syllabus, which all instructors must provide. I doubt, however, that anyone reads through it carefully. And, while this is not surprising, nobody from the department has ever come to my classroom to see how a class session goes. This is consistent with notions of academic freedom, where the instructor is sovereign in making these decisions about course content and how the course is taught. When I was an administrator of campus Ed Tech, I did occasionally attend lectures of some faculty, which was mutually agreed upon ahead of time. After the visit I would send an email where I would pass my observations onto the instructor. It was intended as a friendly way for the instructor to get some critique of the teaching. But it was entirely focused on method and issues that some students might confront as a result of that method. I was not qualified to comment on appropriateness of the subject matter. As a general matter I think there is interplay between method and subject matter, so such a critique would be better from someone in the same field. But as I noted, that is not the common practice.
In The Economics of Organizations, my approach is substantially more labor intensive than the approach taken by other economics instructors. I can afford to spend the extra time this labor intensive approach entails because I'm retired, so am comparatively time abundant. I've embraced my alternative because it allowed me to learn about issues student have with the traditional way the courses are taught. Further, I get to see if my alternative can address some of those issues, which is what has been the driver for my experimentation with the teaching. The particular innovation that seems to have had the best result is getting students to write weekly blog posts (600 words at a minimum) in which they connect their own experiences to course themes. I would then write extensive comments on each post and the students would write comments in response to what I wrote. This very much makes instruction like conversation and has the instructor reacting to student formative thinking in a way that is specific to the particular student. In other words, my comments were not canned and I didn't try to steer the students in some pre-determined direction. My goal was to get them to see the implications of their own thinking and then push that thinking a little further. While at the outset of the class students found this process awkward, after a month or so they would have settled down and then come to appreciate it.
Last year I was told I couldn't teach the class. The campus was frowning on having retirees teach because of the double-dipping it entailed. (Retired faculty get a pension from the State of Illinois. Being paid to teach on top of that for teaching, while allowed under the rules, seemed like an extravagance that a campus struggling with its budget could ill afford.) It wasn't impossible for departments to hire retirees, but procedures were put in place that made it more arduous to do so. Also, the Economics Department had an abundance of other upper level course offerings, so didn't need my class as a way to increase the variety of what was being offered to juniors and seniors who majored in economics.
This year is different, not on the double-dipping but on the variety of other upper level courses in economics. Owing to quite a bit of faculty turnover, these upper level courses for the fall have become scarce, with many of them closed now for further registration because they've reached the maximum enrollments allowed, yet with transfer students who will come to campus in August not having registered yet. So the Economics Department offered me to teach the class again, but this time with maximum enrollments approximately double what they've been in the past.
While I had expressed interest in teaching the class again, this put me in a quandary, particularly about what to do regarding the blogging. Because my comments were typically written over the weekend, and I had to proceed with reading the posts and writing my comments at a pace that was comfortable for me, I was already close to maxed out at the lower number of enrollments. If I were to keep the blogging, I needed to alter my mechanism somewhat, either not comment on the posts of every student each week, or have some help from a TA who would write comments in lieu of mine. Having used undergraduate peer-mentors who had previously taken the class in the late 1990s, when I taught a large section of intermediate microeconomics, and with that pretty effective at the time, I glommed onto the idea of using a former student as a TA.
I had a particular student in mind, who was very diligent with her own blogging when she took the class and I was convinced would do a good job with the comments as my TA. She took the class in fall 2017 and graduated immediately after the course concluded. Indeed, as my course is an upper level course in the major, with the students juniors or seniors, any student who took my class in fall 2017 should have graduated by next fall. So if any of them were to be my TA, they'd be alums of the university as well. (The peer-mentors I had in the 1990s were all current students.) There is no business model in place that I am aware of where a virtual TA is hired who is not currently enrolled at the university, though we do have the occasional virtual instructor who is a faculty member at some other university or who, perhaps, has a full time job outside of academia.
Because there is no business model for this at present, it is hard to know whether using former students who have already graduated as virtual TAs is just a silly idea (they already have a job so the TA work would be above and beyond that) or if it really might make sense for alums who had a good relationship with a professor and would be happy to have that connection continue and be extended via the virtual TA work, in spite of their other employment. In the case of my former student, I did have some back and forth with her via email, but as she was possibly moving to a different job it wasn't clear which of these best describes her situation.
Now let me turn to the title of my post. Being forthright in this case meant asking the Economics Department to pay me a bit more, so I could use the increment to pay the virtual TA, and letting them know that was why I was asking for more money. Keeping things to myself, I could have simply made a side deal with my former student and never informed the department about doing that at all.
Now some things about the money, from my point of view. The last few years in retirement, I have treated what I earn teaching as "mad money" so I can allocate it to expenditure as I see fit, unlike other household spending that my wife and I agree upon (at least in principle). In fact, much of the earnings from teaching would go to the organization I support in my volunteer work, as a charitable contribution to the Foundation in the U.S. that supports this organization. Last year when I didn't teach, I took an early distribution from my IRA for this purpose (plus I had substantial medical expenses that needed to be covered). This year, if I did pay my former student out of my pocket and yet earned what I had been paid for teaching the class in the past, there would be less left over for me to use as donation.
Considering money on the teaching side of things, there are two different models to consider. In a large lecture class, where the homework is done via the online quiz tool in the LMS, exams are given on Scantron forms that are machine scored, and there is a head TA who does a good bit of the course administration, instructor time and effort are largely independent of enrollments in the class. In this case, instructor pay and class size need not correlate very strongly, if at all. In the opposite extreme is the seminar offering, where there is substantial interaction between the students and the instructor, and where the students will do substantial writing that is evaluated by the instructor - term papers rather than blogs in most cases. (I did have term papers in my class, but to make the evaluation of that manageable I put students into teams of three, with one term paper per team, and in weeks where drafts were due, there were no blog posts.) In the seminar much of the instructor effort is proportional to the number of students. Consequently, the appropriate thing to do in the case when you double the enrollments for a seminar that was previously at capacity is to offer it in two sections and pay the instructor for that. Because of the large number of students who major in economics and the size of the classrooms in DKH available for these course offerings, upper level economics classes are a bit too large to be taught as a pure seminar. But I viewed them as closer to that extreme than to the large lecture alternative. So I was a bit irked when the department said they'd pay the same as before in spite of the greater enrollments, implicitly sending a message to me that I should teach the class as if it is a large lecture.
Further, in the back of my head I have in mind the new budgeting rules on campus, which reward IUs taught at a much greater rate than previously. (The IUs for a class are the number of students enrolled times the credit hours the course offers.) While I've not been privy to campus discussions about the purpose of the new budget model, it's not rocket science to conclude that it should drive expenditure on instructors per student upwards and in that way it should improve teaching. Yet it is not that simple. First, instructor hours/IU spent in teaching are typically not measured and is highly idiosyncratic. Instructors who spend more time on a class (and thus less time on something else) presumably improve the quality of instruction without it costing more (paying for the quality improvement by lowering the quality of that something else, whatever it is). Further, teaching decisions are made at the departmental level. Budget allocations based on IUs generated are made at the college level. Economics is but one of many departments in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. It is unclear, at least to me, whether the budget that LAS sets for the Economics department is also IU based or not, nor whether there are substantial lags in how IUs translate into budget revenue, meaning additional IUs taught this year impact budget revenues only next year.
Applying this to my particular situation, as the Department of Economics contacted me fairly late with regard to teaching this class, it may be that they have few funds with which to pay me, yet a sizeable hole to fill in staffing courses so that transfer students can have at upper level classes. So I kind of understand their situation without knowing the details. They did offer me a doctoral student as a TA, who would be paid hourly (by the Department not by me). This is safer for the Department, as there is a business model already in place to use graduate students in this capacity. I've not yet learned who this student will be, so I remain hopeful that I can use the TA in a productive way. However, in the past when the department did assign me a graduate student as a grader, invariably the student would be a foreign national whose spoken English was mediocre. Those graduate students who had high TOEFL scores would become TAs in one of the large intro courses. Only those who didn't get assigned to the intro courses would be available as graders for other courses. So I'm wary that whomever I do get will be able to write good comments on student blogs, no matter how competent the person is with the economics.
Let me make one more point and close. The situation that I've described actually is an example of the alignment problem we consider in The Economics of Organizations course. If we can assume that courses taught in seminar mode are higher quality than courses taught in large lecture mode, and courses in mixed mode have quality somewhere in between, then the issue is what quality coupled with a suitable rate of expenditure per IU does the campus want for my course, what quality does the Economics Department want again paired with an expenditure per IU number, and what quality do I want. (And should that depend on how much I get paid or not?) Does the transfer pricing scheme put into place achieve alignment or not? The campus budget model, as I suggested above, seems to indicate at least a mixture of modes. The Economics Department apparently would prefer me to offer the class as a large lecture. Personally, I would prefer to do otherwise, but I need this to be manageable for me and not to become overwhelming. So I'm still trying to think through how I will conduct the class and what to do about the blogging feature.
I ended up being forthright on the matter with the Economics Department and was told that it was not possible to do as I intended by using my former student as a virtual TA. I'm now feeling some regret and wonder if I played my cards right or not. Even if it ultimately produced the same outcome, with my former student telling me she had too much other stuff on her plate to do this, had I kept this to myself instead I would have at least had a go at my preferred alternative, so likely would not feel the same sense of regret as I'm feeling now. On the other hand, now I will have a few more bucks to donate to the organization I support.
What if I were mentoring somebody else who was in this situation. What advice would I give to that person. We learn the proverb, "Honesty is the best policy" early in life. Is it true or not? I'm wondering about that now.
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