A Slight Mental Step Sideways
Posted by bethrobinson on March 25, 2008
Sometimes moments of comprehension pass by unnoticed.
I had never seen a demand curve before I began taking Managerial Economics for my MBA. I realized at the end of the first week that I was a bit confused, but thought it wasn’t a big deal until I received a disappointing grade on the Week 1 quiz. Yet I’m now at the very beginning of the Week 4 and almost have trouble remembering why I was having difficulty.
I used only very basic study skills to make the change, such as redrawing graphs and jotting down key points from the module instead of just reading the information as presented. There were no aha! moments or times that everything clicked into place, just me looking back and realizing that now I understood.
The topics being covered looked just enough like information I already knew that it threw me off. I only had to take a slight mental step sideways for it to make sense. Yet at the time it seemed a much bigger problem.
And those are my two take away points.
- Just because a situation seems familiar doesn’t mean it is. If it matters, then it may need the same level of attention of something difficult.
- Two people with different backgrounds looking at the exact same thing don’t necessarily SEE the exact same thing.
Yes, I knew these, but my classwork was not a situation I expected to find them illustrated in!
For those of you so inclined, a little more detail….
One example is that I’m used to looking at graphs in which the x-axis is the independant variable, the one which you can control such as percentage or time or distance. The y-axis is the dependant variable, the one that changes as a result of the value you control, such as strength or viscosity.
Not in economics. Quantity is on the x-axis and price is on the y-axis. And they are dependant on each other. If you change one you change the other. You move along the line.
Technically speaking, this is true in a graph of strength versus percentage of a filler. You can pick a strength and say you need this much filler to reach that strength. And I feel like I should have been able to relate that instantly. But I didn’t. Instead I kept trying to use my typical view where y is dependant on x.
Then there was the issue of vocabulary and how that graph was described. If I say that price varies with quantity, or the other way around, it’s an abstract concept. But if I say to myself that if there’s a lot of something available I’m willing to pay less for it than if there’s just one left, then I can start comprehending what the demand curve on that graph means.
The story I was using to describe the data changed how I was able to relate to it, even though it shouldn’t have mattered because the formulas themselves didn’t change. And this was another common concept - perception is reality - that I just wasn’t expecting to find illustrated in class.
Although now I have to wonder why not… Why wasn’t I expecting these complexities to apply to course material just like they apply to other real-world situations?
