Economics Course

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Hey guys, I've started teaching a summer accelerated Economics course. Its basically an entire semester of economics in about 8 days. Stupid I know, but anyways.

Economics can tend to be boring to students because its a lot of details, graphs and other things that they hate. I usually bring up class debate and do my best to make it interesting. Today I had them open fake investing accounts through investopedia and started teaching them some basics of investing. They really enjoyed that until I got into the Production Possibilities curve (actually lessons) and that's when you can tell they don't care.

Anyways, I wanted to ask some of you from your personal experiences of anything you might have done in high school or college in economics courses that made it more fun or enjoyable. Some people simply aren't book worms and I'm in a low income school district so some topics fly right over there head. Anything will do, I'd just like to see some potential topics of debate or other things you feel would be essential to go over.

Tomorrow I am supposed to cover economic systems with Free Enterprise (capitalism is not mentioned anywhere in my district curriculum), Socialism and Communism. Its from 7:30 am - 3:45 so I have a lot of time to cover.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Philly]

I think if you do a little leg work on Google you can probably find some games and thought experiments, both of which would ultimately be aimed at leading to classroom discussions.

When I was in high school I remember a classroom discussion that was really interesting at the time where we basically were contrasting the Utopian ideals of both free economies and control economies with inevitable realities of actual economic systems. It didn't take much for us to reject communism, but we got into a pretty good debate about how much humans can behave as rational actors in a purely capitalist society, and if an ideal free market can exist in a world where people drop 100 bucks on poorly constructed sneakers because of a celebrity endorsement. Our teacher reminded us that in an ideal free market advertising would be unnecessary because actors are assumed to be purely rational and fully informed when making decisions. It was pretty cool stuff for the high school level, though it was an honors class and I think it may be a bit too heavy for a lot of kids that age.

[Saz]

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