My Big Mistake When Teaching During the Pandemic

This is a short post on the one big mistake I made in the hybrid intermediate macroeconomics course I taught during the pandemic.1 The semester’s about over - a week of lecture remains, and I’m done with most of the preparation - so now is the ideal time to write about my experience.

I had worried about, and prepared for, all kinds of problems that could happen when you’re teaching in this format for the first time: technology, student engagement, and explaining difficult concepts in a Zoom discussion, to name only a few. None of those has been a major obstacle as far as I can tell. I’ve even gotten comments from students suggesting I should continue to use my current teaching methods when we return to regular in-person instruction.

The one big mistake was having no answer for “What if I fall behind?” At several points during the semester I ended up diverting large blocks of time into stuff I hadn’t planned to be doing. That wouldn’t have been an issue had I incorporated a way for the course to go on “autopilot” for a few days while I dealt with that. The outcome was using long evenings and a majority of weekends over the course of the semester to catch up. Other areas of work and my personal life suffered. The one bit of advice I’d give myself six months ago is to spend less time preparing material for the class and put more thought into a sustainable course design.


  1. This wasn’t my first time teaching during the pandemic, but it was my first experience converting a medium-sized lecture course (more than 50 students) to an online format. Most of my teaching is econometrics, data science, and programming, where I show students how to turn mathematical ideas into a working computer program.↩︎