My goal in teaching at Penn is to help all my students reach their own individual goals, and to challenge them to set their sights a little higher than they might otherwise have. Because so many people take economics courses for so many different reasons, this means trying to develop a curriculum and classroom style that is as appealing to the Wharton freshman with a keen interest in finance as it is to the College senior fulfilling one last distribution requirement. This is no small challenge, and different Recitation Instructors choose to approach it in different ways. My own preferred choice is to teach the material at a higher level of difficulty than most, but to be readily and actively available to help those students who fall behind - and I believe that all of my students do better that way.

All students at Penn are bright; otherwise they wouldn’t be here. Indeed, teaching here over the past two years, both as Recitation Instructor and as a WATU fellow, I’ve found that students’ intelligence was a much smaller factor in their performance than was the degree to which they chose to prioritize their economics coursework. This is completely appropriate: Penn offers a multitude of academic and non-academic activities, and every student makes choices as to which goals are the most important. The general lectures in economics, which are populated by hundreds of students, also appropriately try to teach to the “average” student. The end result is that many of the students end up bored and unchallenged. I view it as my most important job in section to make sure that they can get as much out of the course as they want to.

I try to challenge students in different ways, each appropriate to the class. In section, I often skip the easy parts of the homework and use the time instead to challenge my students to apply the theory they’re learning to the real world. I engage them in discussions of national economic policy, often using humor as a tool to get them to open up and talk more freely. I also try to augment the material they see in lecture with more advanced concepts, sometimes in class and sometimes in optional sections. I’m pleased to say that these optional sections are well populated, even though they have no impact on the students’ grades.

I realize that this style of teaching tends to benefit the most interested students, and so I’m also careful to make myself available to any of my students who want to do well in the course but don’t have it as one of their highest priorities. I hold copious office hours, sometimes in Houston Hall or Rosengarten Reserves to be more easily accessible to my students. When students are doing badly, I meet with them individually to devise a plan that will allow them to reach their goals. I currently have an Econ 2 student on the football team who got one of the lowest grades in the class on the first midterm. I met with him every week after that, and he got the highest grade on the second midterm, and is well on his way to a high grade in the class.

So far I’ve talked about the most and least interested students, but I think the most important part of my teaching comes with those in between. While I enjoy teaching budding economists, and have an important obligation to those having difficulty, my favorite students tend to be the ones who tell me that they took the course for a requirement but had learned in our discussions in section that economics was a much more interesting way of looking at the world than they had previously believed. These students - those taking the course seriously, but not out of professional necessity - bring to the class a philosophical perspective and an eagerness to learn that benefit the entire section. By treating the material seriously, and leading a discussion-oriented section, I believe I am able to elicit more active participation from this group than I would if I just went over the homework and made sure that everyone understood the basic concepts.

Penn students are not afraid of challenges. They may choose to rise to meet them, or they may choose to merely pass. My teaching philosophy is that all students, no matter what level of interest, should be given whatever support they want in order to achieve whatever goals they set for themselves - and to offer encouragement to set their sights a little higher than they might otherwise have.