First Semester Over.

I have finished up my first semester of teaching "Latin American Development" and I think it went pretty well. Here are some lessons:

1) Offering extra credit only attracts students who value their grade, and would have most likely gotten an A anyway.

2) Telling students you won't curve, and that the "extra credit is the curve" will result in the same conclusion as described above. However it does take a bit out of the arbitrary nature of curves, and students on the margins have a way of sending an effective signal "Hey, I worked in this class."

3) Group projects can be done, however if the students are doing a presentation give them more time to present in class.

4) Group projects are a great way to not have to work on class plans for an entire month.

5) Students parrot the lecture material, either through trying to get by on the grade or because they just do not understand the material well enough to form their own opinion. This was painfully evident in their presentations regarding the topics of: the informal economy, remittances, public vs. private goods. I need to focus more on developing how to analyze these very difficult concepts; judging from their presentations I failed at this over the semester. They got the conclusions presented in class and how I got there, but they showed no differing viewpoint or how to get to that differing viewpoint. I was pleasantly surprised that other arguments arose over provision of education, health care, infrastructure, foreign direct investment, and some rather difficult macro concepts. But I'm still puzzled as to where I went wrong on the others.

6) Two things will happen if you let them choose their own topic: either they will choose something from the lecture material and it will be borring, or they will choose something way out in left field and be very interesting, but difficult for the student to present. The latter is what I was hoping for, and with a few groups they did a fantastic job with topics that I had not covered (the ALBA trade negotiations, a comparison of the reactions of the Mexican and Venezuelan economy to the 2008 Recession as a compare/contrast paper on free market vs. central planning). The majority though were the former; if I want them to go outside the material, I need to provide a list of topics and explicitly tell them to not use what we've covered in lecture.

7) More economics required. Some of them had great background in Latin America, and some of them had great background in economics. The vast majority had neither. More time is necessary on economics for them to understand how the analysis works.

8) Slides are time consuming. In the process of converting my power point slides to beamer presentations. Luckily that does not take as much time as the actual writing of them this semester. Hoping to have a consistent "go-to" slide file to recycle over the semester.

9) Students threaten all kinds of things. Though I have yet to actually be physically threatened by a student I have been told that I will face the wrath of: "my parents", "the provost", "the department chair", "God", and various other figures of authority and deities. Situations of wrath faced by human authority: 0. Divine retribution: Unsure, but I still seem to be alive, walking, and teaching.