In the early 1960's studying to be a Civil Engineer, after we had specialized in 3rd year, we had to do a year of Physics which included Quantum Mechanics and also Geology (both structured for Engineers although we attended many classes with 1st Year Students of those disciplines).
We never quite got our heads around why we as future Civil Engineers had to do a subject that included Quantum Mechanics (which resulted in the Faculty of Engineering ordering the Faculty of Physics to re-mark our final exam papers as they refused to allow that Faculty to fail us). We had less problems with accepting Geology as at least there was a future connection but also a lot of attractive 1st Year Female Geology students.
I found that reading the textbook (particularly for Physics) before lectures just left me more confused. I might as well have been reading in German.
It was only after the Physics lecture that anything remotely made sense. Clearly not much, as 90% failed, including me. Even after re-marking, I still had to re-sit the exam over Summer, which to my amazement I passed.
Subjects in which you have little or no previous exposure that are very technical, are very difficult to 'get your head around' without some guidance. A very good lecturer can achieve that.
One thing I recall from travels in Italy is that you can usually request that the waitstaff bring you a coffee. If you do, it will be significantly better than the pot of coffee on the buffet counter. Same often applies in France
In most respects everything you describe about European hotels also applies to Japanese ones (and in my more limited experience Korean and Taiwanese ones). In Tokyo one of the big differentiators between budget hotels (e.g. APA hotels) and more luxury ones like Prince Hotels is room size. The former are tiny, the latter can be as spacious as American hotels. Japanese hotels tend to not have a breakfast buffet by default, you have to get a reservation that includes it (or pay for it when you eat it) but it is, like the European ones, normally a very good deal and well worth it though if you want the regular American / European food options you may be disappointed as to choice and availability. Japanese hotels often have a dedicated public bathing area (segregated male/female) which frequently includes a sauna and sometimes odd bubble massage sections. After a long day on your feet these are very very welcome.
I like hot tubs, partly to soak in, partly to have casual conversations with strangers. I don't think any of the hotels I stayed in this trip had one, but mid-level and above American hotels often do. I don't know if the Japanese bathing sections would include something similar.
I was delighted with your trick of using any card in the hotel door slot. Then I told my wife about it, and found that she’s known about it for a long time. She used to work in hotels. She just never mentioned it to me…
In my experience, it’s fairly common for European hotels to have a small fridge in the room, although it’s there to contain drinks provided by the hotel for which you’re charged if you drink them. You can also put things in the fridge yourself, if you can find room; but that’s not what it’s intended for.
The biggest buffet breakfast I ever encountered was in a hotel in Eilat, Israel, in 1993. The amount of food on display was quite staggering; I wonder how many deaths from overeating they had to deal with.
The small fridge for drinks you get charged for is common in the US as well. An empty fridge is probably more common in lower end places.
I wouldn't expect deaths from overeating to be limited by quantity of food, since the quantity is effectively unlimited in almost all cases. The question is whether the quality is good enough so you keep eating even after you obviously shouldn't. Several of the European buffets met that criterion. I don't know how much better they would have to be to be lethal.
In the Eilat hotel, I wasn’t really being serious about deaths from overeating; but perhaps the sight of so much food could induce a reflexive desire to make some kind of dent in it all. As far as I remember, the food wasn’t exquisitely gourmet, but it was good enough to be fairly tempting, and quite varied.
I don't know about "exquisitely gourmet," but real croissants (as distinguished from crescent shaped rolls, which is what the London hotel had) are standard, along with multiple other pastries at that level. The Reykjavik hotel actually offered a choice of a range of freshly made things to your order — omelettes, avocado toast (included a poached egg), eggs benedict, ... . In addition to an impressive buffet.
London hotels will usually give you the full English fry up which can be bad for your blood pressure... the full English definitely meets the "main meal is breakfast" concept though
Yes, croissants are quite normal; and my wife sometimes makes them at home, she goes in for home baking. Freshly made things to your order are unusual, although my wife tells me we’ve sometimes encountered it. I was born with a poor memory, she remembers these things better than I do.
I sometimes make a medieval Islamic pastry that is a little like a croissant in being thin layers, but with honey and melted butter poured over it. I don't think I have ever made croissants, probably should try it.
Having mentioned Musamanna, which is a family favorite, I ought to give the recipe, from a 13th c. Andalusian cookbook:
(Original)
Preparation of Musammana [Buttered] Which Is Muwarraqa [Leafy]
Andalusian p. A-60 (Good)
Take pure semolina or wheat flour and knead a stiff dough without yeast. Moisten it little by little and don't stop kneading it until it relaxes and is ready and is softened so that you can stretch a piece without severing it. Then put it in a new frying pan on a moderate fire. When the pan has heated, take a piece of the dough and roll it out thin on marble or a board. Smear it with melted clarified butter or fresh butter liquified over water. Then roll it up like a cloth until it becomes like a reed. Then twist it and beat it with your palm until it becomes like a round thin bread, and if you want, fold it over also. Then roll it out and beat it with your palm a second time until it becomes round and thin. Then put it in a heated frying pan after you have greased the frying pan with clarified butter, and whenever the clarified butter dries out, moisten [with butter] little by little, and turn it around until it binds, and then take it away and make more until you finish the amount you need. Then pound them between your palms and toss on butter and boiling honey. When it has cooled, dust it with ground sugar and serve it.
(End of original, beginning of how we do it)
~ ⅝-¾ c water ¼ c butter at the end
2 c semolina flour ¼ c honey at the end
⅛ lb butter, melted 1 T+ sugar
¼ c ghee for frying
Stir most of the water into the flour, knead together, then gradually knead in the rest of the water. Knead for about 5-10 minutes until you have a smooth, elastic and slightly sticky dough that stretches instead of breaking when you pull it a little. Divide in four equal parts. Roll out on a floured board, or better on floured marble, to at least 13"x15". Smear it with about 4 t melted butter. Roll it up. Twist it. Squeeze it together, flatten with your hands to about a 5-6" diameter circle. If you wish, fold that in quarters and flatten again to about a 5-6" circle. Melt about 1 T of ghee in a frying pan and fry the dough about 8 minutes, turning about every 1 ½ to 2 minutes (shorter times towards the end). Repeat with the other three parts, adding more ghee as needed. Melt ¼ c butter, heat ¼ c honey. Beat the cooked circles between your hands to loosen the layers, put in a bowl, pour the honey and butter over them, dust with sugar, and serve. If you are going to give it time to really soak, you might use more butter and honey.
For regular flour, everything is the same except that you may need slightly more water. You can substitute cooking oil for the ghee (which withstands heat better than plain butter) if necessary.
[Should I do a post on medieval recipes? Favorite recipes in general?]
Another use for the small fridge, during hot seasons, is to chill sundry clothing items: my ever ingenious wife originated this for us (her shirt, bra and knickers (I'm British!) inserted in a run of the mill moth-proof bag emerge refreshingly cool – so I'm told, as contrary to the present fashion, I'm not a cross-dresser!).
I can't recall ever having seen a microwave oven in a hotel room (as distinct from a hotel apartment) – a kettle, on the other hand, I would be disappointed not to find. I'd expect a 50% probability of getting a refrigerator. I've never travelled to the New World, so I can't compare with how things are there.
The card thing is annoying; one time the cleaner accidentally took the card I had been using to keep the electricity on while I was away – luckily it was just an office access card that wasn't too much hassle to replace. Since then, I've learned to use a folded up piece of paper instead.
Is "hotel apartment" a recognized category in Europe? I didn't have a name for it, was just describing my observations. Does that include a keypad at the front door instead of an unlocked door and a human attendant inside it?
I think a kettle was available in all the European hotels and most or all of the American ones of my experience. My wife sometimes complains that the kettle has been used for coffee, tastes like coffee, so works badly for making tea. That's probably in American hotels.
It hadn't occurred to me that a cleaner might take the card. That's a good reason not to use anything I would mind losing.
In Australia we have a recognised Apartment Hotel category, which will typically have either minimal onsite staff (maybe a single person at a reception desk), or none with the keypad system. Or occasionally staff that may work across several separate properties and come on site by appointment (or callout) to help guests check in etc.
Every Fall semester I teach two Principles of Macroeconomics sections, one of around 400 students and one around 500 students. I've done this since 2016 (prior to that I taught much smaller classes). Every semester, when we reach the topic of money supply, I ask if anyone has used traveler's checks. Back in 2016 I might have four to eight students in each section who say they have used traveler's checks. Now I usually have one student in each section. I have not yet reached zero students who have used traveler's checks, but I expect it will happen this Fall or maybe Fall 2025.
When I ask them why they used traveler's checks, they usually say "I don't know" or "it was a weird business thing; I don't remember" or something along those lines.
It sounds like a frightening job. I've never taught a class that large, probably not within an order of magnitude in recent decades. I hope you have TA's to do the grading.
In your experience, is there useful interaction with students at that scale? It raises my old puzzle of why mass lectures didn't disappear with the invention of the printing press. Are there smaller discussion sessions with other people running them?
It was intimidating at first, but one becomes accustomed to it quickly. Grading is mostly automated systems--multiple choice questions, numeric questions, etc. Writing multiple choice questions that separate the best students from the pretty-good students is an art form I had not previously appreciated. TAs are therefore little used for grading, but are important for proctoring exams. The class is a prerequisite for admissions into the business school and some other programs, and we in economics do a good job resisting grade inflation, so there is an incentive for marginal students to cheat.
I use technology to make it feel like a smaller class (or I attempt to do so, anyway). I use OneNote on a Microsoft Surface tablet, and we have a device in the room that receives a video feed from the tablet and transmits it directly to the large projector screens in the classroom. I write all the notes on the tablet as though I were using a marker board. Better still, I can wander anywhere in the classroom, hand the tablet to students, and ask them to draw a graph. Alternatively, I sometimes ask them to "volunteer" a friend to draw a graph. It's a good way to keep everyone alert and on their toes. I can wander anywhere and ask anyone a question, and take questions from anyone in the room.*
It therefore feels a bit more intimate than the head count would suggest. It's still not ideal, though. Students seem more reluctant to ask a question in front of 400 people than in front of 30 people. The size of the spillover benefit from a good question is really big, since there are so many students, which makes it a real shame that there are so few people willing to ask questions. On the other hand, the spillover costs from bad questions are also high, but there are few of those, fortunately.
On the other hand, with so many students, and having taught the class for years, I've gotten to the point that I anticipate and address the most common questions before they come up, so maybe it's okay that there are fewer questions.
*Another beneficial side effect of doing things this way is that I can export my notes to pdf after each class. This is valuable for heading off the many emails from students saying "I couldn't come to class today; what did I miss?" We also have video lecture capture technology in the classroom, so students quickly learn that if they miss a class, it is easy to catch up. Unfortunately, this also incentivizes students to skip attending class, and in my experience, students do better if they attend class**. We address this by using Top Hat, an in-class polling tool, to ask questions, with participation being worth a part of the students' grades. It's a complicated balancing act, reducing the costs of teaching a large class, while also incentivizing attendance. It is a strange thing to incentivize students to attend class, and to incentivize them to study by assigning a lot of homework spread out across the semester, but students have told me directly that without these incentives they would not attend class and would not study until the last minute.
**Whether this is correlation or causation I cannot be confident, but I lean toward the latter. I've seen students who skip the beginning of the semester do poorly on the first exam, get a stern warning from me to start attending class, and then seen students who do so improve dramatically. Sometimes they even tell me that they were surprised to find attending class helps! On the other hand, perhaps they are also exerting more effort on other margins in response to their first exam grade, and attendance did nothing.
Have you written anything on the question of why attending class works, for many students, better than reading a book, or do you have thoughts on the subject? On the face of it the book seems in almost all ways superior to a large lecture class, yet we still have them.
Students' unwillingness to read textbooks is an eternal source of puzzlement to me and to my colleagues. If they are required to read a textbook, they will complain, and won't do much of the reading. I don't know why.
I have gone so far as to use adaptive learning assignments to try to get them to at least skim the most important concepts before I cover them in class in greater detail. Platforms like McGraw-Hill Connect and MacMillan's Achieve can present students with questions, and when students cannot confidently answer them, the systems present them with textbook excerpts and videos, and sometimes other materials, to explain the topic. If I could count on them to read the textbook thoroughly before class, I could do a "flipped" class model, spending class time on exercises and applications. I've tried taking steps in that direction in the past, but it just blows up in my face, as students just won't do sufficient reading before class.
Again, this is regarding introductory classes. When I assign readings for my Law and Economics upper-division elective, students don't complain as much. I think that's mostly because I warn them of the heavy reading load at the start of the semester, and warn them that if they can't handle it, they probably cannot handle law school.
After I wrote my price theory text, I tried teaching the course by telling the students to read a chapter, come to class, ask questions about it — if there were no more questions the class was over. They didn't like it and I switched to a more conventional approach. But I still don't understand why they don't like it.
One guess was that written text felt to them like a foreign language, spoken like their native language. I discussed that with one who was a friend of ours and she said she read for entertainment a lot, which didn't fit that theory.
Indeed, I learned price theory by reading your text, and less so from attending my Intermediate Micro class, even though I had an excellent instructor (Wilson Mixon). I think, however, that we are in the minority.
My hypothesis--and it's just an untestable just-so story--is that in the early evolutionary environment, people learned in two ways:
1) By hands-on training with another human ("Here's how you use an atlatl. Now you try.").
2) By listening to narratives told by other humans around the campfire. There is something about seeing and hearing a human who is physically present that turns on learning, or at least attentiveness.
If that's true, it makes sense that students prefer to learn by listening to a human talking to them, face-to-face. It also makes sense that if they are going to read, they will prefer to read narratives--it's not the same as having a person tell a story to us face-to-face, but it's still a story. A non-fiction technical book is neither face-to-face nor (mostly) a narrative, so most people won't like take to it easily.
This is also why I try to express as many ideas in class in terms of narrative as possible. Writing a definition is fine ("an inferior good is one for which, as income rises..."), and an example is fine ("for many students, ramen noodles are an inferior good"), but explaining a concept using a short story is better ("Think about how many of you are going to have ramen noodles for dinner tonight. Why? Because you're students with limited income. Now imagine you've graduated and got that first job...").
This also suggests that the more difficult it is to fit the material of a field into a narrative, the harder it will be for most people to learn. I find econometrics much more difficult than any other field of economics, and I think it's probably for this reason. It's harder for me to see human behavior in the math, unlike micro, where it's a pretty straightforward translation.
(Are film and television close substitutes for a narrative told by a physically present person? When it comes to learning, I'm skeptical but open to persuasion.)
Those of us who can learn by reading equations and technical language are probably weirdos.
With respect to museums, The Deutsches Museum in Munich can essentially justify a trip to Munich. It is one of the world's best science and technology museum's - the best certainly that I have seen. I first saw it in the mid 80's, before it took over the old municipal airport for its larger exhibits. Technology includes musical instruments, boats, vehicles, bridges, chemistry, .....
Are you familiar with the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago? The airplanes hanging from the ceiling are real, and it has its own coal mine, although I suspect it doesn't actually produce coal.
I will be happy to visit it when I am next in the area. If I remember properly, the museum in Munich had a mock-up of an ancient Southern German salt mine works for historical flavor.
The Franklin Museum in Philadelphia was nice, but quite small, I used to take my young kids there 40 years ago.
If you are ever down by DC, the Udvar Hazy Air and Space museum by Dulles airport is wonderful. Three airplane hangers filled with all manner of air craft from SR 74 to the last space shuttle to a Concord etc. Being a huge space the crowds aren't bad, you just pay for parking, and you don't need to go into the rats' warren of DC to get there. We used to live fairly nearby and took the girls there once or twice a year. Definitely worth visiting if you have to be in the area.
It so happens that David's daughter visited it, so he also has her account to rely upon. I assume it was favorable, though that may also be because one of our group had offered to serve as an informal tour guide (and a quite good one).
I'm surprised! I'd assumed she'd mentioned it to you by now. But that's fine. If you do decide to go, I hope you'll give warning in the usual channels; I think a lot of us would love to meet you there, including the guide (bean).
In the early 1960's studying to be a Civil Engineer, after we had specialized in 3rd year, we had to do a year of Physics which included Quantum Mechanics and also Geology (both structured for Engineers although we attended many classes with 1st Year Students of those disciplines).
We never quite got our heads around why we as future Civil Engineers had to do a subject that included Quantum Mechanics (which resulted in the Faculty of Engineering ordering the Faculty of Physics to re-mark our final exam papers as they refused to allow that Faculty to fail us). We had less problems with accepting Geology as at least there was a future connection but also a lot of attractive 1st Year Female Geology students.
I found that reading the textbook (particularly for Physics) before lectures just left me more confused. I might as well have been reading in German.
It was only after the Physics lecture that anything remotely made sense. Clearly not much, as 90% failed, including me. Even after re-marking, I still had to re-sit the exam over Summer, which to my amazement I passed.
Subjects in which you have little or no previous exposure that are very technical, are very difficult to 'get your head around' without some guidance. A very good lecturer can achieve that.
Misc comments
One thing I recall from travels in Italy is that you can usually request that the waitstaff bring you a coffee. If you do, it will be significantly better than the pot of coffee on the buffet counter. Same often applies in France
In most respects everything you describe about European hotels also applies to Japanese ones (and in my more limited experience Korean and Taiwanese ones). In Tokyo one of the big differentiators between budget hotels (e.g. APA hotels) and more luxury ones like Prince Hotels is room size. The former are tiny, the latter can be as spacious as American hotels. Japanese hotels tend to not have a breakfast buffet by default, you have to get a reservation that includes it (or pay for it when you eat it) but it is, like the European ones, normally a very good deal and well worth it though if you want the regular American / European food options you may be disappointed as to choice and availability. Japanese hotels often have a dedicated public bathing area (segregated male/female) which frequently includes a sauna and sometimes odd bubble massage sections. After a long day on your feet these are very very welcome.
I like hot tubs, partly to soak in, partly to have casual conversations with strangers. I don't think any of the hotels I stayed in this trip had one, but mid-level and above American hotels often do. I don't know if the Japanese bathing sections would include something similar.
Well that's the public bath part. It's a large pool of water in which you sit and relax after you've washed off the dirt first.
I was delighted with your trick of using any card in the hotel door slot. Then I told my wife about it, and found that she’s known about it for a long time. She used to work in hotels. She just never mentioned it to me…
In my experience, it’s fairly common for European hotels to have a small fridge in the room, although it’s there to contain drinks provided by the hotel for which you’re charged if you drink them. You can also put things in the fridge yourself, if you can find room; but that’s not what it’s intended for.
The biggest buffet breakfast I ever encountered was in a hotel in Eilat, Israel, in 1993. The amount of food on display was quite staggering; I wonder how many deaths from overeating they had to deal with.
The small fridge for drinks you get charged for is common in the US as well. An empty fridge is probably more common in lower end places.
I wouldn't expect deaths from overeating to be limited by quantity of food, since the quantity is effectively unlimited in almost all cases. The question is whether the quality is good enough so you keep eating even after you obviously shouldn't. Several of the European buffets met that criterion. I don't know how much better they would have to be to be lethal.
In the Eilat hotel, I wasn’t really being serious about deaths from overeating; but perhaps the sight of so much food could induce a reflexive desire to make some kind of dent in it all. As far as I remember, the food wasn’t exquisitely gourmet, but it was good enough to be fairly tempting, and quite varied.
I don't know about "exquisitely gourmet," but real croissants (as distinguished from crescent shaped rolls, which is what the London hotel had) are standard, along with multiple other pastries at that level. The Reykjavik hotel actually offered a choice of a range of freshly made things to your order — omelettes, avocado toast (included a poached egg), eggs benedict, ... . In addition to an impressive buffet.
London hotels will usually give you the full English fry up which can be bad for your blood pressure... the full English definitely meets the "main meal is breakfast" concept though
But in my experience is not nearly as good as the breakfast buffet in European hotels.
Yes, croissants are quite normal; and my wife sometimes makes them at home, she goes in for home baking. Freshly made things to your order are unusual, although my wife tells me we’ve sometimes encountered it. I was born with a poor memory, she remembers these things better than I do.
I sometimes make a medieval Islamic pastry that is a little like a croissant in being thin layers, but with honey and melted butter poured over it. I don't think I have ever made croissants, probably should try it.
Having mentioned Musamanna, which is a family favorite, I ought to give the recipe, from a 13th c. Andalusian cookbook:
(Original)
Preparation of Musammana [Buttered] Which Is Muwarraqa [Leafy]
Andalusian p. A-60 (Good)
Take pure semolina or wheat flour and knead a stiff dough without yeast. Moisten it little by little and don't stop kneading it until it relaxes and is ready and is softened so that you can stretch a piece without severing it. Then put it in a new frying pan on a moderate fire. When the pan has heated, take a piece of the dough and roll it out thin on marble or a board. Smear it with melted clarified butter or fresh butter liquified over water. Then roll it up like a cloth until it becomes like a reed. Then twist it and beat it with your palm until it becomes like a round thin bread, and if you want, fold it over also. Then roll it out and beat it with your palm a second time until it becomes round and thin. Then put it in a heated frying pan after you have greased the frying pan with clarified butter, and whenever the clarified butter dries out, moisten [with butter] little by little, and turn it around until it binds, and then take it away and make more until you finish the amount you need. Then pound them between your palms and toss on butter and boiling honey. When it has cooled, dust it with ground sugar and serve it.
(End of original, beginning of how we do it)
~ ⅝-¾ c water ¼ c butter at the end
2 c semolina flour ¼ c honey at the end
⅛ lb butter, melted 1 T+ sugar
¼ c ghee for frying
Stir most of the water into the flour, knead together, then gradually knead in the rest of the water. Knead for about 5-10 minutes until you have a smooth, elastic and slightly sticky dough that stretches instead of breaking when you pull it a little. Divide in four equal parts. Roll out on a floured board, or better on floured marble, to at least 13"x15". Smear it with about 4 t melted butter. Roll it up. Twist it. Squeeze it together, flatten with your hands to about a 5-6" diameter circle. If you wish, fold that in quarters and flatten again to about a 5-6" circle. Melt about 1 T of ghee in a frying pan and fry the dough about 8 minutes, turning about every 1 ½ to 2 minutes (shorter times towards the end). Repeat with the other three parts, adding more ghee as needed. Melt ¼ c butter, heat ¼ c honey. Beat the cooked circles between your hands to loosen the layers, put in a bowl, pour the honey and butter over them, dust with sugar, and serve. If you are going to give it time to really soak, you might use more butter and honey.
For regular flour, everything is the same except that you may need slightly more water. You can substitute cooking oil for the ghee (which withstands heat better than plain butter) if necessary.
[Should I do a post on medieval recipes? Favorite recipes in general?]
Another use for the small fridge, during hot seasons, is to chill sundry clothing items: my ever ingenious wife originated this for us (her shirt, bra and knickers (I'm British!) inserted in a run of the mill moth-proof bag emerge refreshingly cool – so I'm told, as contrary to the present fashion, I'm not a cross-dresser!).
I find it hard to believe that the heat capacity of clothes you wear in hot weather is enough for the effect to last long once you put them on.
Your command of physical laws is sound, but the cost (to me) is zero and even fleeting bliss has its charms:
Plaisir d'amour ne dure qu'un moment...
Or as Malthus put it (by memory so probably not verbatim):
"Connubial pleasure is inferior to intellectual pleasure only in its duration."
Thank you for the delightful quotation and apt riposte.
I can't recall ever having seen a microwave oven in a hotel room (as distinct from a hotel apartment) – a kettle, on the other hand, I would be disappointed not to find. I'd expect a 50% probability of getting a refrigerator. I've never travelled to the New World, so I can't compare with how things are there.
The card thing is annoying; one time the cleaner accidentally took the card I had been using to keep the electricity on while I was away – luckily it was just an office access card that wasn't too much hassle to replace. Since then, I've learned to use a folded up piece of paper instead.
Is "hotel apartment" a recognized category in Europe? I didn't have a name for it, was just describing my observations. Does that include a keypad at the front door instead of an unlocked door and a human attendant inside it?
I think a kettle was available in all the European hotels and most or all of the American ones of my experience. My wife sometimes complains that the kettle has been used for coffee, tastes like coffee, so works badly for making tea. That's probably in American hotels.
It hadn't occurred to me that a cleaner might take the card. That's a good reason not to use anything I would mind losing.
In Australia we have a recognised Apartment Hotel category, which will typically have either minimal onsite staff (maybe a single person at a reception desk), or none with the keypad system. Or occasionally staff that may work across several separate properties and come on site by appointment (or callout) to help guests check in etc.
A business card (ideally belonging to some idiot who you don't want to contact again) works well for this purpose
Every Fall semester I teach two Principles of Macroeconomics sections, one of around 400 students and one around 500 students. I've done this since 2016 (prior to that I taught much smaller classes). Every semester, when we reach the topic of money supply, I ask if anyone has used traveler's checks. Back in 2016 I might have four to eight students in each section who say they have used traveler's checks. Now I usually have one student in each section. I have not yet reached zero students who have used traveler's checks, but I expect it will happen this Fall or maybe Fall 2025.
When I ask them why they used traveler's checks, they usually say "I don't know" or "it was a weird business thing; I don't remember" or something along those lines.
It sounds like a frightening job. I've never taught a class that large, probably not within an order of magnitude in recent decades. I hope you have TA's to do the grading.
In your experience, is there useful interaction with students at that scale? It raises my old puzzle of why mass lectures didn't disappear with the invention of the printing press. Are there smaller discussion sessions with other people running them?
It was intimidating at first, but one becomes accustomed to it quickly. Grading is mostly automated systems--multiple choice questions, numeric questions, etc. Writing multiple choice questions that separate the best students from the pretty-good students is an art form I had not previously appreciated. TAs are therefore little used for grading, but are important for proctoring exams. The class is a prerequisite for admissions into the business school and some other programs, and we in economics do a good job resisting grade inflation, so there is an incentive for marginal students to cheat.
I use technology to make it feel like a smaller class (or I attempt to do so, anyway). I use OneNote on a Microsoft Surface tablet, and we have a device in the room that receives a video feed from the tablet and transmits it directly to the large projector screens in the classroom. I write all the notes on the tablet as though I were using a marker board. Better still, I can wander anywhere in the classroom, hand the tablet to students, and ask them to draw a graph. Alternatively, I sometimes ask them to "volunteer" a friend to draw a graph. It's a good way to keep everyone alert and on their toes. I can wander anywhere and ask anyone a question, and take questions from anyone in the room.*
It therefore feels a bit more intimate than the head count would suggest. It's still not ideal, though. Students seem more reluctant to ask a question in front of 400 people than in front of 30 people. The size of the spillover benefit from a good question is really big, since there are so many students, which makes it a real shame that there are so few people willing to ask questions. On the other hand, the spillover costs from bad questions are also high, but there are few of those, fortunately.
On the other hand, with so many students, and having taught the class for years, I've gotten to the point that I anticipate and address the most common questions before they come up, so maybe it's okay that there are fewer questions.
*Another beneficial side effect of doing things this way is that I can export my notes to pdf after each class. This is valuable for heading off the many emails from students saying "I couldn't come to class today; what did I miss?" We also have video lecture capture technology in the classroom, so students quickly learn that if they miss a class, it is easy to catch up. Unfortunately, this also incentivizes students to skip attending class, and in my experience, students do better if they attend class**. We address this by using Top Hat, an in-class polling tool, to ask questions, with participation being worth a part of the students' grades. It's a complicated balancing act, reducing the costs of teaching a large class, while also incentivizing attendance. It is a strange thing to incentivize students to attend class, and to incentivize them to study by assigning a lot of homework spread out across the semester, but students have told me directly that without these incentives they would not attend class and would not study until the last minute.
**Whether this is correlation or causation I cannot be confident, but I lean toward the latter. I've seen students who skip the beginning of the semester do poorly on the first exam, get a stern warning from me to start attending class, and then seen students who do so improve dramatically. Sometimes they even tell me that they were surprised to find attending class helps! On the other hand, perhaps they are also exerting more effort on other margins in response to their first exam grade, and attendance did nothing.
Have you written anything on the question of why attending class works, for many students, better than reading a book, or do you have thoughts on the subject? On the face of it the book seems in almost all ways superior to a large lecture class, yet we still have them.
Students' unwillingness to read textbooks is an eternal source of puzzlement to me and to my colleagues. If they are required to read a textbook, they will complain, and won't do much of the reading. I don't know why.
I have gone so far as to use adaptive learning assignments to try to get them to at least skim the most important concepts before I cover them in class in greater detail. Platforms like McGraw-Hill Connect and MacMillan's Achieve can present students with questions, and when students cannot confidently answer them, the systems present them with textbook excerpts and videos, and sometimes other materials, to explain the topic. If I could count on them to read the textbook thoroughly before class, I could do a "flipped" class model, spending class time on exercises and applications. I've tried taking steps in that direction in the past, but it just blows up in my face, as students just won't do sufficient reading before class.
Again, this is regarding introductory classes. When I assign readings for my Law and Economics upper-division elective, students don't complain as much. I think that's mostly because I warn them of the heavy reading load at the start of the semester, and warn them that if they can't handle it, they probably cannot handle law school.
After I wrote my price theory text, I tried teaching the course by telling the students to read a chapter, come to class, ask questions about it — if there were no more questions the class was over. They didn't like it and I switched to a more conventional approach. But I still don't understand why they don't like it.
One guess was that written text felt to them like a foreign language, spoken like their native language. I discussed that with one who was a friend of ours and she said she read for entertainment a lot, which didn't fit that theory.
Indeed, I learned price theory by reading your text, and less so from attending my Intermediate Micro class, even though I had an excellent instructor (Wilson Mixon). I think, however, that we are in the minority.
My hypothesis--and it's just an untestable just-so story--is that in the early evolutionary environment, people learned in two ways:
1) By hands-on training with another human ("Here's how you use an atlatl. Now you try.").
2) By listening to narratives told by other humans around the campfire. There is something about seeing and hearing a human who is physically present that turns on learning, or at least attentiveness.
If that's true, it makes sense that students prefer to learn by listening to a human talking to them, face-to-face. It also makes sense that if they are going to read, they will prefer to read narratives--it's not the same as having a person tell a story to us face-to-face, but it's still a story. A non-fiction technical book is neither face-to-face nor (mostly) a narrative, so most people won't like take to it easily.
This is also why I try to express as many ideas in class in terms of narrative as possible. Writing a definition is fine ("an inferior good is one for which, as income rises..."), and an example is fine ("for many students, ramen noodles are an inferior good"), but explaining a concept using a short story is better ("Think about how many of you are going to have ramen noodles for dinner tonight. Why? Because you're students with limited income. Now imagine you've graduated and got that first job...").
This also suggests that the more difficult it is to fit the material of a field into a narrative, the harder it will be for most people to learn. I find econometrics much more difficult than any other field of economics, and I think it's probably for this reason. It's harder for me to see human behavior in the math, unlike micro, where it's a pretty straightforward translation.
(Are film and television close substitutes for a narrative told by a physically present person? When it comes to learning, I'm skeptical but open to persuasion.)
Those of us who can learn by reading equations and technical language are probably weirdos.
I saved a $10 (or was it $20) traveler's check in a drawer, just so I would have one to remember.
With respect to museums, The Deutsches Museum in Munich can essentially justify a trip to Munich. It is one of the world's best science and technology museum's - the best certainly that I have seen. I first saw it in the mid 80's, before it took over the old municipal airport for its larger exhibits. Technology includes musical instruments, boats, vehicles, bridges, chemistry, .....
Are you familiar with the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago? The airplanes hanging from the ceiling are real, and it has its own coal mine, although I suspect it doesn't actually produce coal.
I will be happy to visit it when I am next in the area. If I remember properly, the museum in Munich had a mock-up of an ancient Southern German salt mine works for historical flavor.
The Franklin Museum in Philadelphia was nice, but quite small, I used to take my young kids there 40 years ago.
If you are ever down by DC, the Udvar Hazy Air and Space museum by Dulles airport is wonderful. Three airplane hangers filled with all manner of air craft from SR 74 to the last space shuttle to a Concord etc. Being a huge space the crowds aren't bad, you just pay for parking, and you don't need to go into the rats' warren of DC to get there. We used to live fairly nearby and took the girls there once or twice a year. Definitely worth visiting if you have to be in the area.
It so happens that David's daughter visited it, so he also has her account to rely upon. I assume it was favorable, though that may also be because one of our group had offered to serve as an informal tour guide (and a quite good one).
I don't have her account yet — she and her mother are getting home in about another seven hours. But I will ask her for it.
I'm surprised! I'd assumed she'd mentioned it to you by now. But that's fine. If you do decide to go, I hope you'll give warning in the usual channels; I think a lot of us would love to meet you there, including the guide (bean).