I do like these questions. You need to cut them down, so I would start with:
#1 (and 2)This is too meta, and students probably won't take it seriously. Likewise #2 Dive right in with a Malthusian question.
#11 has the "that was not mentioned by Prof DeLong" clause that will probably be a big dampener on discussion. Maybe if you mentioned 3 of them and had them pick?
#20 attempts to get students to think empirically about a question that is most often addressed ideologically. This is great. You know your students better than me, can they do this? #19 I think does this better.
#26 is a great thing to think about, but it's kind of long-winded. I'd ditch it. An ideal discussion question, to my mind, is easy to state and hard to answer.
#31 as a practical matter has too many moving parts. It's hard to focus on as a discussion question.
That's the stuff that jumps out. Again, I think all the questions are good, but I think some work better as online discussion prompters than others. That's just my own intuition speaking.
Wow, these are great questions! Your lucky students are much cleverer than I remember us being when I was a student. Or perhaps it is only that Melissa Dell is much cleverer than our professors were.
The questions about course organization and content give currently existing students an opportunity to vent about how much they dislike Aristotle but mainly seem valuable to future generations of students. I wonder whether your current students are happy to give up 2/15 of their questions to the future. But maybe they are as selfless as they are clever.
Also, LMAO at question #1 ... which you seem to need to think like an economist to answer?
Seems highly likely. The really puzzling thing to me is that the Soviets could throw away two 3-million soldier tranches of their army in 1941, and still win. Nazi logistical and industrial incompetence? And I do believe that Tukhachevsky would not have lost one tranche of the army at the border, to no effect on the Nazi war machine; and would not have lost a second tranche of the army at Smolensk and Kiev, to little effect on the Nazi war machine.
I do like these questions. You need to cut them down, so I would start with:
#1 (and 2)This is too meta, and students probably won't take it seriously. Likewise #2 Dive right in with a Malthusian question.
#11 has the "that was not mentioned by Prof DeLong" clause that will probably be a big dampener on discussion. Maybe if you mentioned 3 of them and had them pick?
#20 attempts to get students to think empirically about a question that is most often addressed ideologically. This is great. You know your students better than me, can they do this? #19 I think does this better.
#26 is a great thing to think about, but it's kind of long-winded. I'd ditch it. An ideal discussion question, to my mind, is easy to state and hard to answer.
#31 as a practical matter has too many moving parts. It's hard to focus on as a discussion question.
That's the stuff that jumps out. Again, I think all the questions are good, but I think some work better as online discussion prompters than others. That's just my own intuition speaking.
Thx...
Wow, these are great questions! Your lucky students are much cleverer than I remember us being when I was a student. Or perhaps it is only that Melissa Dell is much cleverer than our professors were.
The questions about course organization and content give currently existing students an opportunity to vent about how much they dislike Aristotle but mainly seem valuable to future generations of students. I wonder whether your current students are happy to give up 2/15 of their questions to the future. But maybe they are as selfless as they are clever.
Also, LMAO at question #1 ... which you seem to need to think like an economist to answer?
Seems highly likely. The really puzzling thing to me is that the Soviets could throw away two 3-million soldier tranches of their army in 1941, and still win. Nazi logistical and industrial incompetence? And I do believe that Tukhachevsky would not have lost one tranche of the army at the border, to no effect on the Nazi war machine; and would not have lost a second tranche of the army at Smolensk and Kiev, to little effect on the Nazi war machine.