The Tragedy of the Commons has been on my mind of late, and something serendipitously popped up in class today that’s started me thinking of new ways to introduce some important economic concepts and make classroom jobs work better at the same time.
You see, one way of preventing abuse of shared resources is to assign the rights to the resource to someone, anyone really, and allow them to trade and regulate the use. Who gets control of the resource does not ultimately matter for conservation. As long as the owner and their rights are clearly defined they will try, in a rational world, to get the most for them, and make them last as long as possible, thus preventing overexploitation.
But what’s necessary for this to work is some form of goods or services that’s worth trading. The miracle of capitalism is that it allows people to do what they’re best at and trade with others for the other things they need (or don’t want to do). I’m not about to start letting students pay cash to each other, but I’m trying to think if there’s any reason to not let them trade their classroom jobs on a daily basis.
Say a student if done with their daily work and is feeling bored with a little time to kill at the end of the day. They take out the compost and clean up the microwave, their classroom job is done. Well, they could offer to do someone else’s job, someone who is, say, trying to finish up their math and don’t want to break away from it, and, in exchange, the student with the math work would do the microwave and compost job tomorrow while the first student takes a break. Everyone is happier!
In theory, as long as the rights and responsibilities for each job are clearly defined, then students will be able to come up with the most efficient trading schemes for themselves. Once trading starts I’m sure students will come up with some interesting agreements and contracts will need to be enforced (fortunately we already have judges built into the classroom constitution). But we might just need a special white-board that would make it easier to trade jobs. Tadah, we now have a market in the classroom that makes doing jobs a little easier for everyone and brings some important economic concepts directly into the classroom. Why have I not thought of this before?
I am quite enthused by the idea, but I’m really curious to see if anyone can come up with any downsides.
I began pondering this again this year as well. I’ve been concerned with trading as a manipulative tactic – a kind of “hey, see how this penny is larger than that tiny dime . . . don’t you want to trade?” thing but with older children. I’m interested to see how your class works this out.
I’m hoping that because the students had to come up with the classroom jobs themselves, and the jobs are chosen randomly at the beginning of the 6-week cycle, they’ll be trading things of fairly equal value. With middle-schoolers, my greatest concern is because there are, potentially, a lot of ways they could game the system. I’m hoping with simple, clear rules (e.g. they can only trade jobs) we can keep it honest.
The classroom jobs idea is also a great lead-in to the division of labor, labor saving devices, and capital accumulation.
The classroom jobs idea is also a great lead-in to the division of labor, labor saving devices, and capital accumulation.
That’s a great point. I think I’ll have to put together some vocabulary cards and a lesson or discussion.