"When I first began teaching, I worried about myself. Had I prepared enough material? Was I smart enough? Was my slip showing?" says Catherine "Kate" Krause. But she adds that over the years she realized that it wasn't about her. It was about her students, and slowly she began teaching in a fundamentally different way.
Photo: Associate Professor Catherine "Kate" Krause
Krause is an associate professor of economics at UNM and has taught everything from Freshman Learning Communities to introductory macroeconomics classes with nearly 200 students. She taught upper division and graduate seminars and teaches teachers about economics through the Albuquerque Teachers’ Institute.
Krause is a behavioral economist and she considers what people do when faced with economic decisions that don’t have obvious “right” answers. Should I gamble? Donate to charity? Recycle? Leave a tip? She tries to encourage her students to be curious and skeptical about what economic models tell us about human nature. Krause frequently tells her students to write about their own economic behavior and the economic choices they observe around them.
Her drive to persuade her students to question and reach conclusions and judgments helped make her a UNM 2008 Outstanding Teacher of the Year. This fall she can be found teaching Introductory Microeconomics, Public Finance, Reading for Honors, Senior Honors Thesis, Master’s Thesis and Dissertation courses.
Media Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; email: kwent2@unm.edu