The only teaching philosophy that makes sense of the way I teach, and especially of the way I prepare, is the simple dictum ""Nothing has to be confusing or boring." I approach each syllabus, each lecture, even each problem set, with the view that my job is to make the material both sensible and interesting. The result, I hope, is courses that are widely accessible and that stimulate students to think about economics long after they leave Berkeley.

The first part of the dictum, "Nothing has to be confusing," is the central component of good teaching. Students should never have to struggle to understand a lecture. The idea that lectures should explicate the essence of the material in a clear and coherent way is what makes teaching intellectually challenging. Even at the most basic undergraduate level, one has to constantly evaluate which ideas form the central core of economics and which are tangential or outdated. At the graduate level, I often feel as if I am writing a twenty-page term paper each time I prepare a lecture. However, boiling material down to its essence and making it as clear as possible does not mean that students aren't challenged; it just means that they are challenged by the ideas instead of the presentation.

Preparation is the key to clarity. Everything from planning the syllabus to writing the final exam has to be thought out carefully if students are to learn as much as possible. For me, this inevitably means rewriting lectures each year as I find out what works and what doesn't.

But mere clarity is not enough. Teachers need to constantly think of what would make the material more exciting. This is especially true in economics, where people often joke that there are only two kinds of students: those who hate economics and those who really hate economics. I am convinced that every concept in economics can be interesting. The key is to find examples and applications that students find exciting. Every spring, when I teach Econ 1, my husband has to endure morning newspapers that have already had all the interesting economics articles clipped out. Worse yet, he often finds his own behavior the subject of my lectures. For example, I often illustrate comparative advantage and specialization, two of the central concepts in economics, by our household's decision about who washes all the dishes (my husband) and who does all the painting and wallpapering (me). I find that anything that makes students perk up and listen makes them learn the material better and remember it.

The key to preventing boredom is, again, preparation. It takes as much effort to find interesting examples and plan lively discussions as it does to figure out the unifying theme of some literature. I suppose, therefore, a more succinct way to describe my teaching philosophy is simply "Work like crazy." It is not as positive as "Nothing has to be confusing or boring," but it is just as accurate.