Biography
William C. Wood is currently professor of economics at James Madison University and the director of JMU’s Center for Economic Education. Wood received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia in 1980 and has held faculty positions at Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia and at Bridgewater College. Wood was the recipient of teaching awards at the University of Virginia and at James Madison University, where he was the 2001-2002 Distinguished Teacher in the College of Business. Wood was named in 2002 as an inaugural winner of the Southern Economic Association’s Kenneth G. Elzinga Distinguished Teaching Award. Wood is also a past recipient of the Alpha Kappa Psi-Clifford D. Spangler award for research in risk and insurance and the Best Paper award for the Journal of Private Enterprise. He is the author of three books, more than 20 scholarly articles, and national economic education materials for school and adult audiences. Currently his research interests include industrial organization, behavioral finance and economic education.The Interview with William C. Wood
» As an undergraduate at Auburn University you were the editor of the campus newspaper and headed for a career in journalism. How did you get from there into economics?
I graduated in 1974 and got the job of my dreams, working for the Associated Press. I was ambitious and impatient and wasn’t advancing fast enough with the AP. So I decided to get a master’s degree in economics as a way of getting to the Washington bureau of the AP. But then in graduate school at the University of Virginia, I was a T.A. for Ken Elzinga’s big sections of Principles of Economics. I found out that I liked teaching better than journalism.
» Have you ever thought about combining your interest in economics with that of journalism?
Yes, I have. In a way, I never really stopped being a journalist. When I go before a Principles class, I’m bringing them back reports from the front lines of economics. The students aren’t ready to understand cutting-edge journal articles, but they are ready to understand the way our thinking has changed about, say, the natural rate of unemployment. I also wrote an article back in 1985 published in the Journal of Economic Education, when I still remembered more about what it was like to be a reporter and about how reporters’ view of the world affects their economic reporting.
» Economists generally believe that most journalists, including those in the business and finance areas, are largely economic illiterates. What are your views on this topic?
I draw a big distinction here. The reporting on business and finance has gotten better and better since I’ve been paying attention. The top people on the news side are really quite good, and people like Robert Samuelson (in the Washington Post) have been making a contribution with their columns.
But economic reporting by political writers hasn’t seen the same improvement. Political writers so often don’t even know the right questions to ask when they’re covering economic legislation. They haven’t even begun to understand the richness of the economics behind these issues.
You sometimes say that you are a micro-economist teaching macroeconomics. What do you mean by that and how does this affect your zeal for the teaching of macro?
I think there are a lot of us in that category: “microeconomists drafted to teach macroeconomics.” We have half or more of our Principles students on the macro side, and yet our training and our research are on the micro side. All the same, macroeconomics has been very, very good to me. I had the opportunity to study macro and monetary theory under some very good people at the University of Virginia, B.T. McCallum and Leland Yeager, and also the opportunity to teach 500-student macro sections even before I finished my Ph.D. Some of the most important economic questions people face as voters are macroeconomic. All that together has made me an enthusiastic teacher of macroeconomics.
» What are one or two of your favorite topics that you look forward to covering in your classes? Why are they favorites?
This is going to sound a little strange, but for me there is still excitement in showing students the supply and demand model. It’s been called the most powerful model in the social sciences, and I agree with that. All of my students have heard the terms, and many have even seen the diagram, but few have really understood it or put it through its paces when I see them in their first or second year here.
In a similar way, I look forward to covering the introduction to money. There are so many things students think they know about money – that it’s backed by gold in Fort Knox, for example – and I enjoy showing students the wonder of having a medium of exchange that’s just green pieces of paper.
» Are there a few topics that you believe are really important for you to get across to students in introductory classes? Do you have some “tricks” that you use to get key points across?
I think it’s awfully important for macro students in particular to understand the fallacy of composition, so I have students pretend they’re at the stadium. I have one student stand up to see the game better, then have all the students stand so they all can see. Then I ask that one student how the view is. I’ve even had students do a cheer based on that old high school cheer that spells out the name of the school. It starts, “Give me a C!” and goes all the way through the expenditure formula for GDP, C + I + G + NX. At first the students are a little inhibited about cheering in class, but then they get into it. Very few forget that formula.
» Sometimes unexpected things happen in the classroom. What are your two or three most memorable classroom experiences?
Once when I was teaching in an auditorium, I was using an overhead projector and a huge screen. It was a warm spring day and a bee flew in and landed right on the screen so that students were seeing this huge bee shadow on the diagram. I said something like, “I guess you’re all wondering why I had that bee fly in for this demonstration.” They laughed, and then I said, “Well, I’ve been talking with some of you at office hours who said you just have to get a B in this class. There’s your B.”
Not long ago, I had my first grandstudent – son or daughter of someone I taught. Early in my teaching career, I had Paul Villella in class, and I remembered that he was a married undergraduate. In fact, I even remembered that he brought his baby Ethan to show everyone one day. Twenty years later, Ethan showed up in my econometrics classroom.
» What are the most common misconceptions on the part of students in your introductory classes?
Their misconceptions come back to one theme, that we live in a zero-sum world. Students come into my classes so quick to believe that if a price goes up, sellers gain and buyers lose and that’s the end of the story. They come in believing that any change in tax laws or fiscal policy could only help the rich at the expense of the poor, or the poor at the expense of the rich. Of course, there are important zero-sum elements in our world, but this view can keep students from seeing the importance of markets and institutions that allow us all to thrive.
» As the Director of the Center for Economic Education at James Madison University, you work a lot with high school teachers. What are some of the things you do in order to help them become better teachers and make their economics classes more interesting?
I’ve developed an approach I use with teachers called “Hit and Run Economics.” The idea is that, instead of devoting a class to an economics lecture and demonstration, they take one small topic and hit it quickly and move on. This is especially effective for, say, government teachers that need to make an economic point. Sometimes the most effective work with teachers involves content rather than methods. Gerry Swanson from the University of Arizona showed me how engaging content can be when we taught schoolteachers together with the Academy for Economic Education. They always wanted “more content, less methods,” because they knew the methods. And Gerry made the content real to them. I once asked him if I could borrow some of his in-class demonstrations and he joked – “sure, because I stole them from someone else in the first place.” Actually Gerry was highly original, but he recognized that good teachers will borrow and adapt from the rest of world, including the academic world.
» You have been teaching for a couple of decades now. What advice would you give a beginning economics teacher today? Do you have a couple of key tips that you would give a young economist wanting to become a great teacher?
I’d say first understand your students. Think of someone about their age and pitch your presentation to that person. As time goes by, students change, and that requires a change in presentation. Second, don’t make it too easy. Sometimes beginning teachers think that good teaching is the same thing as making it easy for students. For example, they’ll labor long and hard to give the perfect review session the evening before the test. The trouble is that students catch on and have a very elastic response. If you give the perfect review session the first time, you can expect students to study less for the second test, counting on that review session. The best teachers are, I think, something like the best coaches. They work you hard and you may not appreciate it at the time. But you learn from that hard work.
» Have changes in technology influenced your teaching?
Yes, they have. I can still remember the day I came into class and excitedly told the students I had just retrieved information from a computer in . . . Britain! I had used a text-based browser called Gopher. Of course, today that would be a big yawn since we take the Internet for granted.
I run a GDP predicting contest to motivate students in macro Principles. They collect information from the Internet and make their predictions, then use a simple Web form to send the results to me. That’s the kind of thing you could do without technology, but probably wouldn’t do because it’s just so cumbersome.
Changes in technology have also influenced my teaching in a less positive way. Students live in a wired, 24/7 world and their attention spans have gotten quite short. I’ve had to shorten sections of material and provide more changes in presentation. Even then, there are students who seem to find even simple analytical exercises to be “too long.”
» PowerPoint is now widely used in the classroom. Does PowerPoint help many of us become better teachers? Are there pitfalls?
PowerPoint can help us to better organize our thoughts and to show visuals. Perhaps the biggest pitfall of all is the pre-scripting that PowerPoint naturally encourages. When a piece of chalk is poised over a board, or a pen is poised over an overhead projector, anything can happen and students know that. There’s a sense of possibility that you just can’t get when the next slide is ready and cued. At the current state of technology, PowerPoint-focused classes too often lose that sense of possibility.
» Good economics teachers are always looking for ways to make their classes more fun and, at the same time, get important points across to students in memorable ways. Do you have any suggestions along this line?
The main suggestion is not to let any one thing go on too long without a change in stimuli. If that one thing is your voice speaking, it had better not be a monotone. If that one thing is an overhead or computer projector, turn it off or blank it for a while.
I’ve seen the in-class “clickers” that are used to tabulate student responses and I’ve used something similar. But there’s a lot of gain to be had just by running a quick applause poll. That’s when you turn your back on the class and say, “I want you to applaud to register your votes in this poll.” And then you subjectively judge which choice got the most applause.
I’ve had a lot of success, I think, with contests. Students find competition highly motivating, even if they’re just predicting the first quarter GDP with a box of cookies as the prize.
» You authored “Getting a Grip on Your Money,” a book that focuses on personal finance. Do you integrate personal finance into your introductory courses?
Yes, and more than I used to. For most of the class, it’s an occasional remark or application, such as individuals trading off risk and return. But in macro Principles I also have a day when I show students the specific implications of compounding, diversification and efficient markets.
» College students do not seem to have a very good understanding of credit cards, saving, investing, and other personal finance issues. Is that a problem and, if so, should we be doing more to deal with it at the college level?
I’m of two minds about that. It’s definitely a problem that students get into credit trouble so early, graduating with maxed-out credit cards. And yet, it seems more a lack of self-control than a lack of knowledge, and I’m not sure how effectively we can teach self-control. I once thought we should have “exit orientation” for students on the way out just as we have entrance orientation for our new students. But so often, students have already made major mistakes by the time they’re on the way out.
» Who are a couple of people that have had a major impact on your career as an economist?
My greatest success is when I get my students to start applying their own powers of intellect. There’s no pattern, no template I can teach them that will be as effective as the ones they’ll devise on their own if I can get them excited about economics. I get a great deal of enjoyment from my students’ successes; I know there’s some interpersonal utility comparison involved, but when I see a student succeed in law, or in economics, or in public policy, I tell that student, “I’m not as happy as you are for you, but I’m almost that happy.”
» How would you like to be remembered by your students?
Here, I would reiterate a point made earlier. Develop your own personal teaching style. Select pedagogical tools and approaches that complement your personality and interests.» What do you consider to be your greatest success as a teacher of economics? How would you like to be remembered several years from now by your students?
I would like to be remembered as someone who cared about them – not in the sense of being their pal, but caring enough to get them to work hard. And I’d like to be remembered as someone who was true to his discipline, his convictions, and his faith.
