| U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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| Volume IX, Number 2 |
March
2004 |
| U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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| Volume IX, Number 2 |
March
2004 |
Frank Giarratani, EconomicsI establish a theme—an issue or focal point to which they may return. Even though we’re covering many topics, students have this touchstone.
Because Introduction to Microeconomic Theory is a foundation course, we need to cover a substantial amount of content. Naturally, expectations are well established that a student who successfully completes this course will have been exposed to certain core topics. In various disciplines, students can be overwhelmed by the enormous amount of information in introductory courses, and this course is obviously one of them. Although I don’t feel we need to cover every topic in the textbook, there is still a superabundance of content that can confound students. Therefore, I feel it is necessary to establish a theme—an issue or focal point to which they may return. To do so, each semester I determine a simple but fundamentally important theme for the course, something that has been a core to intellectual inquiry in the field of economics for, in some cases, hundreds of years. I go with something I’m interested in at any particular time, for example, “Fairness versus Efficiency as Criteria for Social Choice,” “Do Markets Work Well?” or “Property Rights through History.” I weave that theme through the entire course; regardless of a particular topic, we systematically revisit the theme, whether by example, challenge, or explicit theoretical development. In that way, even though we’re covering many topics, students have this touchstone. By the end of the course, along with all the facts, statistics, data, theories, and concepts they’ve learned, they also will have comprehensively considered a specific economic theme that is truly important. | ||||
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