Failing Intro Economics

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2022/09/ap-economics-is-a-mo...

I think most of his points in the featured article are missing the point even if his thesis is generally correct. In my memory, most students were pretty poor. Lots of them did not understand how to learn. They tried to get through class and make up for it later, and then found that hard, and so they gave up, then scraped by because the classes themselves weren't really all that hard and you could do fine without understanding it. I can't imagine this guy's econ 101 is very different.

Now imagine that cohort after a couple years of being half tuned into remote learning classes? Yeah they probably suck at school. I only learned how to be a student in the last couple years of high school. If I was instead just playing video games while half listening to a zoom for those two years I'd probably be a lot worse off too.

Typically, professors announce office hours during which they will be available to answer questions, so this is not an issue.

From a professor's perspective, online options for tutoring students are vastly inferior. Helping a student understand a concept is interactive: you must ask the student questions, listen to their explanations, and formulate explanations to give back to them. That is very difficult in a text-based medium, particularly in a course involving mathematics or other things that don't really fit in plain text. (And while I can write LaTeX math quickly, my students cannot.)

You'll also often have multiple students asking questions. In person, it's easy to group together related questions, and to jump from student to student -- or to say "why don't you talk to Sarah, she's working on the same problem." In an anonymous online setting, you lose that, and students can't connect to each other.

I've used asynchronous online platforms like Piazza, and you lose all the opportunity to listen to students and figure out what exactly they're thinking. Instead you just provide a wall of text for them. And of course students learn to expect responses within hours at any time of day, including weekends, and start getting annoyed if you don't respond quickly to a question posted at 4am Saturday morning. You start to dread the Piazza notifications. Yes, you can set expectations and insist you only answer during certain hours, but other courses will have that one fanatical TA who answers at all hours, and so your students will still be annoyed.

edit: That being said, you're right about students being more willing to use anonymous options. When I lectured online due to COVID, and students could send a direct message to me in the Zoom chat, I got loads of questions. I had to learn to keep the chat open on a second monitor to follow the questions and respond in real-time. As soon as we switched back to in-person teaching, the questions stopped, and the class would just stare at me blankly if I asked if they had questions. But I'm not sure how to replicate that option in person.

> Professors need to get with the times and make themselves available through channels that their students are more comfortable with

Let’s all do whatever the students believe it is more convenient for them, so they don’t have to impose themselves :-)

(For the benefit of young people who may confused about the timeline of technology in the dark ages, telephones were already quite popular in 1972.)