College Board, the company that runs the AP program, creates clear expectations for what constitutes a college-level class. In fact, they have minimum requirements to even allow a teacher to label his class "AP." Despite these requirements, though, College Board prefers to remain detached from the curricular side of teaching; they provide the content, but give full freedom to teachers to determine
how
to teach the material. Consequently, developing a curriculum is perhaps the most difficult aspect of teaching an AP course. Not only must the teacher teach the content, but he must also figure out strategies for helping students understand highly theoretical concepts within an engaging framework. This became my challenge in the 2012-2013 academic year.
Due to the highly theoretical framework of the content, I wanted to create a unit that would help my students develop a deeper understanding of the context surrounding the economic concepts we learned. AP Microeconomics tends to be highly conceptual and even more theoretical. The content often depicts theoretical extremities to illustrate perfect scenarios along the spectrum of market structures (i.e. perfect competition or perfect monopolies). By understanding the extremes of the spectrum, students more easily grasp the subtle transitions and differences along the market structure spectrum (i.e. monopolistic competition and oligopoly). Although market structures like monopolistic competition and oligopoly are more practical and readily seen, a much greater emphasis is placed on the extremes and much less realistic market structure of a perfectly competitive firm and the slightly more realistic structure of a monopoly.
In this unit, students will examine economic content within the context of the petroleum market. Students will learn how subsidies incentivize production and consumption of products and that while the role of government intervention in the economy is to move production toward social efficiency, that the government often overlooks marginal costs to society in order to provide increased marginal benefits. That is, tangible benefits to society, like increased production, which can partly be measured by an increase in gross domestic product (GDP), often outweigh intangible costs to society, like global warming and future negative environmental impacts. Students will debate the extent to which the government should intervene. Should the government prioritize innovation and promote alternative renewable energy sources or should it focus on growing the economy in whatever way is most efficient given the resources we have right now?
