From the comments

Nicest thing a student ever said to (apart from “I hope you like this malt”) is “You certainly taught me to spell ‘baloney’”.

I was a philosophy major and econ minor at my undergrad institution. My intermediate price theory teacher told me the first day, to my face, “Folks like you don’t do well in my class.” And I didn’t.

Doug North once made a fat joke at my expense. Despite being one million years old, he still had the twinkle in his eye of a young whippersnapper. Yes, I am still bitter.

I was a freshmen taking the required gen ed course in intro to econ at BU. There was this professor who played the devil’s advocate on the issue of funding for health care. I was adamant in my extremely liberal beliefs that government ought to save everyone from their own mistakes. I was so irritated that I kept taking econ courses, hoping upper level econ courses would prove him wrong. I am now an econ professor.

Favorites were micro and industrial organization, and it is interesting to see both of them evolve from classical to more nuanced with the application of game theory. What I learned is how to learn, not what to learn. You need to keep learning. Just develop the tools to learn. I also worked with an IO prof part time for several years, and from him I learned how to work with data, often being willing to be surprised and never disappointed from that. He had practiced IO as the head of the FTC Bureau of Economics, and everything, everything was data analysis, which has a funny way of making you more open minded to see that theory can be a bit rough around the edges and not necessarily explanatory unless you are willing to consider alternative hypotheses.

My first-year economics teacher has a unique set of phrases. He would often say “Ding How!” or “Boo How!” (Chinese for very good and not good), and would say “Zork!” whenever something went wrong. Along with “Ta da! It’s true it’s true!” when proving something with graphs. The lingo has soaked up by my group of friends, and one girl even listed it as her “Favorite Quotes” on her Facebook profile for quite some time.

In the same class, when reviewing the results of a test (and going over the answers), I pointed out that he had made a mistake in one of his explanations. The entire class was clapping and cheering when I was done with my explanation. Then the Professor realized his mistake was that he was talking about a different problem entirely.

One time a math teacher asked me for my name. I meekly raise my hand, being a scared little freshman, and the teacher said I scored highest in the class. After being congratulated by my friends, he remarked under his breath that he had made a mistake and I actually scored the SECOND highest. Talk about a buzz-kill!

A high school history teacher, about two weeks or so before graduation, said at the end a group presentation on Syria that he thinks I might have been one of his greatest losses (he was the Debate coach at the school for a few years)

One time during a real estate finance class, our professor asked us to bring our special calculators so we could learn how to use the amortization function. One of my friends brought his calculator still in the packaging. This is obviously not useful, so someone handed him a knife to cut the packaging open. He gashed his hand pretty deep instead. I think the girl we were sitting with nearly fainted.

Well, that’s my nostalgia for now.

“I would request that MR readers offer up examples, either from their time as teachers or, more aptly, from their time as students, of what they remember from a particular class.”

For me, the strangest thing happened a couple days ago when someone pointed out that I’ve been rated online. The older comment comment seems unfair, but I know the class referenced: it was one in which the weaker students were noisy and the better students quiet, which is the reverse of the rest of my classes and might have led to the perception referenced.

Or maybe I’m wrong and am too hard. I supposed that’s what threads like this one are designed to point out.

John Taylor’s intro Econ class was memorable– he was a gifted lecturer. I remember him wearing a pumpkin on his head around Halloween, getting into a screaming match with a student (his daughter, home on break from Princeton) to illustrate some point or another, and his good natured self deprecation the day after the 96 election (he headed Dole’s econ team). Michael Boskin also guest lectured a few times, and he introduced us to the idea of cap and trade for acid rain pollutants, which he had spearheaded in the first Bush administration. It sounded nutty at first, but it has certainly worked pretty well.

As far as concepts, for some reason comparative advantage took a long time to click with me; I remember struggling with Taylor’s examples at the student union until one night it fell into place and I understood why country A wanted trade with country B…

My intro to economics teacher was explaining the production possibility frontier, but rather than use guns and butter she asked for two products from the class. We thus ended up talking about the differences in inputs between beer and vodka. When she asked the class to name some of vodka’s inputs, someone in the back shouted “Russians!”

In 2002-2003, the intermediate micro lecturer at Harvard was so bad that the college replaced him with the head TF for the middle third of the class. (He came back for the last third supposedly more prepared.) How is it possible to get such a terrible lecturer for a multi-hundred person class at Harvard? Unfortunately, this was a good reason not to do much of the work in the class. Got a B- (sorry, no grade inflation).

In Ec10, Martin Feldstein would devote his last lecture of the year to student questions. I submitted three (oil, drugs, and gold) hoping to get one answered. He answered all three as the first three questions. That was a rush.

I also remember the tests in Ec10 being difficult and long. The point was to spread out the range of scores to get a better view of the upper end of the spectrum — which students were really pulling ahead. First time I realized how tests scores are often compressed in the 80-95 range, which doesn’t allow you to get a quick read on outstanding performers.

Watching Bryan Caplan wear shorts and sandals in January. He would come into the classroom and fold his leather bomber jacket and put it on the floor under his desk then start lecture.

Sitting in the nosebleed seats of a massive Intro to Macroeconomics lecture hall; listening to the Graduate Teaching Assistant work through an example of the money multiplier 3 times, unsuccessfully. When I explained what he was doing wrong, he looked back at me, probably thinking “If this slacker in the back can see it. . .”, looked back at the board, threw up his hands and said “Alright! Class dismissed!”

I was not proud… that’s probably another 149 people that will never quite grasp the concept, but we did get out early.