By Ashutosh Tiwari
In the spring of 2004, together with a long-time friend Surendra Sthapit, I taught microeconomics on Mondays and Wednesdays for a total of four hours a week to full-time MBA students at Kathmandu's Ace Institute of Management for a semester.
Ace's officials appeared quite confident about taking a risk on a relatively unknown, yet professionally busy, quantity like me.
At the time, I had a demanding full-time job -- running a business development facility called Business Service Aadhar at Heritage Plaza in Kamladi. And the last thing I needed was sleepless nights worrying about what and how I was going to teach the following day.
Still, after talking things over with friends, I accepted the early-morning teaching assignment for two reasons.
First, I wanted to develop the discipline of being a teacher: preparing lesson plans, devising problem sets, and answering difficult questions that the students might ask.
Second, I wanted to see whether Surendra and I could help make economics a fun and exciting subject that students saw as having immediate real-world applications.
Briefly, then, here are four lessons we took home from our teaching work.
VALUE STUDENT DIVERSITY: Nepali MBA students come from a variety of academic, ethnic and social backgrounds. Some have BBA. Others have previous degrees from engineering, hotel management or arts and humanities faculties. Some are scions of reputed business families. Others hardly know anyone influential in Kathmandu. Some went to fancy high schools, and can dream in English. Others find it difficult to carry conversations in English. Some understand differential equations. Others don't know what y = mx + c means.
Similarly, some have been overseas. For others, Kathmandu is the first major city they've been to since leaving villages. True, institutions such as Ace need to do more outreach activities to attract a diverse set of qualified students from traditionally underrepresented ethnic groups, and academic and social backgrounds.
But as things stood, we found the students united in their desire to earn the MBA degree to do well in life, either in or out of Nepal. That is why investing time to get to know the students can be quite helpful. That way a teacher understands where the students are coming from, what their dreams and aspirations are, and how they expect to use the education and the degree to lead productive, fulfilling lives.
EMPHASIZE LOGIC OVER MATH: Economics, as non-economists are amazed to find out, is best taught by using calculus. Indeed, mathematics has long been the shorthand of economics, just as it is of physics. But given time constraints and students' uneven academic backgrounds, it was neither possible nor practical to turn MBA micro classes into calculus boot-camps. As such, a judgment call was necessary to decide how to teach microeconomics effectively.
As a teacher, you want students who are going to be managers later on to get enough practice to be able to reason economically by using straightforward logic, and not get stuck on mathematical techniques.
With this goal in mind, apart from using basic algebra, our teaching was through deductive reasoning. For the students, learning economics then became a relatively background-neutral pursuit: If they made efforts to think through and argue logically, then, they could reason well by making use of the standard economic assumptions and principles.
ECONOMICS TO UNDERSTAND EVERYDAY LIFE: Almost all students appeared to have previous economics training that convinced them that the subject was dry and boring, and had zero relevance in their lives. And their teachers apparently taught the subject in ways to hammer home that belief. The result was that the students came to class -- all ready to be indifferent to indifference curves and theories of perfect competition. Yes, they "knew" economics in a memorized sense. But they had no understanding of how to use it to interpret and explain everyday issues.
We attempted to confront this problem by using Nepal-specific, drawn-from-the-headlines examples whenever possible.
The idea was to underscore that economics is very much around us, and that, with some effort, students should be able to apply, at a minimum, classroom learning to dissect news items that appeared in the business press.
To that end, we started each class by having a student or two present short economic analyses of newspaper reports. From explaining why oil prices were rising globally to why Nepali fashion models appeared to have short careers to why music-video producers do not pay much money to actors to what could be done to improve the traffic flow to ease the congestion at Putali Sadak, the students explored a variety of news-items through the lens of economics.
At the end, each wrote a five-page paper in English explaining some everyday issue that made them show their competence in economic reasoning. The downside of all these activities was that we were behind in covering the syllabus, and had to arrange for additional classes to catch up.
But the greater reward was that most students appeared to have become genuinely excited by economics. They repeatedly told us they had never thought that the subject could have such immediate and widespread applications in their lives.
FOCUS ON THE CORE: It's very tempting to cram everything about microeconomics in a semester. Since most MBA students are beginners, such an approach can be self-defeating for two reasons.
First, the students are not going to be economists per se. They are going to be managers who need to use the tools of economics to make managerial decisions in private or public sectors.
Second, teaching too many concepts often confuses the students, who end up having a scattered view of the discipline. As such, it is more important, as a mater of teaching strategy, to ensure that, at a minimum, the students thoroughly master the core concepts of incentives, opportunity costs, trade-offs, marginality, trade, competition and other such cornerstones of economics than about the relatively obscure points about, say, the cobweb model.
Looking back, I am not sure, despite our best efforts, how much economics the students really learnt from Surendra and me. Hindsight is always better, and surely, we could have done better in ways more than one.
But as it happens with any teaching activity, it was us who, at the end of the semester, learnt a lot more about the subject and about the art the teaching economics.
[Shortly after completing the semester of teaching, Surendra Sthapit left for London, England, where he's pursuing banking-related advanced studies; Ashutosh Tiwari took up a job in Dhaka, Bangladesh at the South Asia-focused office of the International Finance Corporation (www.ifc.org), the private-sector arm of the World Bank. This article first appeared in Kathmandu's BOSS business monthly, April 2006 issue.]
A related article in The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/business/yourmoney/12view.html
