Economics 1010b, "Macroeconomic Theory"

About six weeks into Ec1010b, “Macroeconomic Theory,” Professor Nicola Fuchs-Schundeln left the podium to write some unintelligible equation on the board.

The few students in lecture were shocked. Until that day, Fuchs-Schundeln had not moved with the exception of tapping her laptop to advance to another one of her blue and yellow slides.

Those who attended Fuchs-Schundeln’s lectures did a lot of that type of tapping themselves. As she droned on about Irving Fisher’s theory of consumption, IS-LM and the value of the stock market, most of the class was instant messaging or else tapping in their sleep. When Fuchs-Schundeln would enthusiastically ask the class some question, , few but the overeager kids in the front row would respond.

To be fair, the dreariness of Ec1010b was not entirely Fuchs-Schundeln’s fault. She probably wanted to cover the material in the assigned text, Mankiw’s Macroeconomics. The book is clear, but not geared for stimulating lectures. Most topics quickly descend into explaining the minutiae of graphs that artificially prove a theory. Little will probably change as Paola Giuliano of the International Monetary Fund takes over the course this year.

Although most students tend to do well in Ec1010b (the key is to read the assigned chapters) the class’s requirements are nerve-wracking. The midterm is worth 30 percent of the grade and the final is worth a whopping 60 percent.

That means that while students tend to snooze during lecture, the pace of textbook reading is frenetic to the end.