Issue of
December 3, 1997
 
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John Taylor’s
theory of surprise-side
economics
BY KATHLEEN O'TOOLE
To Stanford
undergraduates, John Taylor normally looks and sounds
ever so much like a former member of the President's
Council of Economic Advisers and a man with Alan
Greenspan's ear. On the stage of Kresge Auditorium, he
stands high above the students. His broad shoulders,
fitted precisely into a tailored dark suit, are held high
and straight. His thick, gray hair behaves as if it never
met a wisp of wind, and his clear, rich voice booms
explanations, in proper English sentences, for the red,
blue and green line graphs projected on two screens
behind him. But a few years from now, what these students
will remember is the morning when their stately professor
morphed into a California raisin and danced to Marvin
Gaye's "Heard It Through the Grapevine."
Related
Information:
"What I hope they
remember is the lesson of the demand curve moving to the
right, and in the case or raisins, as a result of
government intervention," Taylor recently told a
gathering of Stanford teachers. "What I am trying to
do with these surprises is to make economics less
abstract, more intuitive, more interesting and relevant
for large lecture classes. I think of entertainment and
education as closely related."
Taylor may be conservative
in his economic philosophy but the Mary and Robert
Raymond Professor of Economics is willing to "court
disaster" in order to persuade his students that
economics is interesting and informative. In a class of
650, he says, it is easy to appear unapproachable. Part
of the message of his raisin performance is unspoken:
"If I can do this in front of 650 people, you can
ask a question."
Economics 1 has been
transformed this fall thanks to Taylor and Stanford's new
emphasis on improving the classroom experiences of
freshmen and sophomores. Taylor's raisin impersonation
patterned after a commercial that helped raise the
consumer demand for raisins and reduce the government
subsidy to grape growers has been an annual treat for
some time. But the course is undergoing a substantial
overhaul with a three-year grant from Ramón Saldívar's
office of Undergraduate Studies. In a university where
the word "center" usually refers to research or
extracurricular activities, Taylor proposed and received
approval for a new "Economics 1 Center" devoted
to improving the teaching of the beginning economics
course, which is taken by 60 percent of Stanford
undergraduates.
Tied into the center's
efforts to improve the basic course are three new
seminars next quarter for freshmen who have completed the
basic course. When President Gerhard Casper announced
plans to encourage more tenured faculty to offer small,
intensive seminars to underclassmen, some faculty said
they feared it would not work because beginning students
would not have the necessary background. One goal of the
new Econ 1 course is to provide freshmen with the
analytical tools they will need to investigate antitrust
policy with Professor Frank Wolak, social security policy
with Professor and Dean John Shoven and welfare reform
with Professor Tom MaCurdy.
Undergraduates like to
meet and learn from many people, especially famous ones,
so Taylor invited Nobel economist Milton Friedman to one
class this fall and former senator and basketball star
Bill Bradley, a visiting scholar at the Institute for
International Studies, to another. "It's not so easy
to bring in relevant speakers because a lot of logistics
is involved," Taylor says. "Collette Anderson,
our administrative assistant at the new center, makes
more of this possible."
Anderson also deals with
students' schedule conflicts, classroom availability and
other logistical problems that afflict high-volume
courses. In the past, Taylor said, department secretaries
handled such details but they have their hands full
assisting the large number of majors in the Economics
Department.
The center will also have
a coordinator, recent doctoral graduate Marcelo
Clerici-Arias, beginning next quarter and has 20 teaching
assistants who are assigned to Econ 1 all year. The
larger number of TAs reduced the small group sessions
from about 30 students to 15. Mark Tendall, a TA with
three years' experience, says the size change has
increased student involvement. "They are more
confident raising ideas at our weekly meeting."
For the first time this
fall, the TAs were given formal training in teaching as
well as videotape critiques of their teaching. A new web
page [http://www.stanford.edu/class/econ1/ ] provides assignments,
announcements, answer keys and breaking economic news
stories related to classwork. Recently, the webmaster
added a video clip, and there are plans to offer more,
including an economic experiment with bid-ask auctions
that students can try in their dorms. (The web version
would allow students to repeat at their own pace the
fast-moving trial auction conducted in their weekly small
group sessions.)
"The web has really
cut down on the paper we use," said Scott Kush, a
teaching assistant who also acts as webmaster. "And
when we have a really good review section, we can tape it
and put it online as a supplement to the review sections
students attend." As a teaching tool, he said, the
web fits well with the philosophy of educational
psychologist Howard Gardner about people having different
forms of intelligence and therefore different ways of
learning.
In Taylor's words,
economics is both a "fuzzy and techie" subject,
fraught with "little hurdles" abstract ideas
or simplified models of the real world that many
students have trouble grasping, particularly in
macroeconomics. He tries to teach the concepts that he
wished all politicians understood when he was trying to
advise them in Washington, he says. "Economics
didn't come instantly to me," he says, which is
perhaps one reason he tries to teach each concept in a
variety of ways. One way involves inviting his wife,
Allyn, to class to illustrate the concept of
"comparative advantage" in international trade
policy. He introduces her as a lawyer with a master's
degree in economics. She is a better economist than he
is, he says, but a better lawyer than she is an
economist. As a result, it is to their comparative
advantage for her to do the lawyering and for him to do
the economics.
While the web and video
technology hold great possibilities, Taylor says one of
his most successful lecturing techniques is an old-tech
idea that he stole from another teacher. "I use two
overhead projectors, not one." In a recent class
where he was introducing economic growth concepts, Taylor
displayed a "techie" graph on the left
projector and a more word-oriented, analogy-driven
explanation of it on the right, moving from one to the
other in his oral presentation. The two projectors, he
says, "allow me to be more efficient with the time I
have."
When the Center on
Teaching and Learning asked him to lecture recently on
his teaching techniques, several teachers wanted to know
what Taylor did when one of his new ideas backfired or
when technology failed him. He had told them, for
example, about how he surprises students in the middle of
one dry lecture by having Adam Smith, talking from the
heavens, interrupt him. For this trick, he and Smith rely
on an earthly public address system.
"Sometimes there is a
disaster," he said. "It always helps to be
prepared. I review my timing in advance every time. Adam
Smith usually speaks over the PA system, but if it
doesn't work, I have my ghetto blaster." Even if a
new idea falls totally flat, he said, "there is
still the element of surprise, and students, especially
beginning students, love the attempts."
The new center will not
make every Econ 1 lecture like Taylor's. Clerici-Arias
will teach the winter quarter course and Michael Boskin,
another former member of the Council of Economic
Advisers, will teach the spring version. They will have
access to the materials and personnel who worked with
Taylor this fall but will try experiments of their own.
While Taylor sees entertainment as a tool for getting
students more involved in his subject, he says that other
teachers have different methods for accomplishing the
same goal. This struck him recently when he was in the
Rocky Mountains trying to learn a new method of skiing
from two different instructors, both of whom were
helpful. "You can use technical words to talk about
how to teach something, but each teacher then has to use
his own words with the students."
The second edition of
Taylor's Economics textbook was published this
fall by Houghton Mifflin along with a videotape of him
lecturing on key concepts. The tape will supplement the
book in Econ 1 courses all over the country. It has
colorful graphics developed by an animator who produced
improvements on Taylor's hand-drawn charts. It has video
clips of economic activities around the world to replace
some of his oral descriptions. A viewer of the tape can
see Taylor's facial expressions more clearly than can
those who watch him from the second row of Kresge. One
wonders, looking at it, if Taylor, the 1992 Hoagland
Prize winner for teaching, will retire soon from the live
stage.
"The videotape does
make you wonder about the future value of large lecture
classes," he concedes. But after 10 years in Econ 1,
he isn't ready to bolt for the movies. "You can
still surprise them on stage," he says, by
overlaying three esoterically labeled economic graphs on
the projector to form the words "Beat Cal" just
before the bell rings, or by planting his daughter
Jennifer, visiting from Princeton, in the audience and
then letting the students vote on whether to erect a
"free trade barrier" and kick her out.
"Perhaps we'll have
fewer live lectures in the future," he says, a tinge
of sadness in his voice, "but I think it's
inherently more exciting to be there." SR
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