Partly as a tip of the hat to Steve Greenlaw, partly because it just seemed interesting, I’ve subscribed to one of the BoilerCasts at Purdue University: Econ 210, “Principles of Economics,” taught by Professor Kelly Blanchard. Driving in to work today, and driving through the drive-thru for my midday chow, I listened to the first day of class in what sounds like a large lecture hall. I believe Dr. Blanchard spoke of seven TAs, so I’m guessing the enrollment is over 100 students, perhaps well over. The hall holds nearly 500 students.

The class meets three times a week, twice for lecture and once for “recitation” (a TA-led discussion group). The first ten minutes or so of day one were taken up with administrative stuff: the “Katalyst” (with a “K,” like the name of the school of management) course management system, the syllabus, etc. I found this part weirdly interesting. There’s an astonishing amount of implicit culture bound up in the administrative details everyone at a university takes for granted, and hearing about it gave me a strange feeling of defamiliarization, like visiting a family with very different customs.

Professor Blanchard is a very good lecturer. She speaks clearly, in a lively and conversational tone, but always driving forward with an impressive momentum. She sprinkles her lecture with asides ranging from Back to the Future to her love for chocolate and shoes. She sounds both knowledgeable and personable, and has the gift of introducing concepts by emphasizing their strange or counterintuitive nature. I admire this in an intellectual. It’s a hook for the brain: “you might think this, but actually something rather different is true.” An element of surprise and wonder enters the discourse, something like the “oh!” moments that pepper Doug Engelbart‘s speeches.

I found the lecture easy to follow, so much so that I wasn’t sure what I’d gain from reading a textbook, other than elaboration. In fact, I had the strong feeling that I was actually learning economics. A tough exam would put that feeling to rest, I’m sure, but I have found myself thinking about several parts of the lecture at odd moments during the day: micro- vs. macroeconomics (I knew the difference, but my knowledge has a little more depth now), the idea that behavior resulting from scarcity is of central interest to the economist (I hadn’t thought of scarcity as a catalyst for the field, or as an essential part of its self-definition), and most interestingly of all the fact that some economists distinguish two types of labor: physical labor and entrepeneurial labor. The latter has to do with thinking up ideas. Immediately my mind began looping Lessig-wards, thinking about intellectual property and intellectual labor, thinking about whether and to what extent work in the academy counted as entrepeneurial labor, and so forth. The larger point here is that Blanchard’s tone, her willingness to say a little about her own life, her evident enthusiasm and knowledge, and most of all that sense of strangeness or unexpectedness I tried to articulate above, combined to inspire me to consider aspects of my experience in the light of what she was saying.

I see from her faculty biography that Dr. Blanchard is interested in the economics of information. I surmise this interest led her to join the BoilerCast podcasting effort. And I wonder if she’ll speak more about this particular interest as the course progresses.

I should also say that today was the first day of teaching for me this term, and hearing another professor go through another first day was oddly reassuring and comforting. Students don’t realize this, probably: every first day for a teacher feels like a first day, no matter how many first days we’ve had. Nervous, exhilarated, and (for me) very curious about how this journey will end come December.

Dr. Blanchard doesn’t have an especially sonorous voice. She isn’t theatrical, or overtly charismatic, or portentous. She is, however, expert at coming up with those hooky moments, like catchy bits in a melody, that have the brain hmmming along. It’s that explaining voice, scaled up to project to a large lecture hall, scaled out via podcasting to reach potentially an even larger audience, one listener at a time.