Hawaii Teacher Wins Regional NASDAQ Award

Dee’s winning entry, “Marching Supply and Demand Activity as an Example of Physiomnemonomics (4th Dimension in Teaching Economics)” was just one of the myriad ways in which he makes the teaching of Economics come alive. For his winning lesson, he made his students hold up red and blue ropes to demonstrate the concept of the demand and supply curve. He aptly summed up the rationale for this hands-on session with, “Don’t just see the curve, be the curve!”

Dee’s penchant for ‘teaching through doing’ is evident in his lessons which has created a greater enthusiasm for the subject among his students. One of Dee’s students, Kamaile Maldonado, attributes her enthusiasm for economics to Dee’s ability to draw his materials from a variety of sources, including journals, newspapers and magazines and the internet. According to Kamaile, Dee’s energy “leads to such animated explanations that his students derive as much entertainment benefit (sic) as educational benefit.”

“He really gets to know his students and he uses that to mold the curriculum to fit the lifestyle and learning habits of each individual student,” Maldonado said.

Dee’s efforts to promote the teaching of economics have often gone beyond the classroom and into projects like Project Gecko, a two-day environmental economics seminar held this year for 48 Advanced Placement classes.

Dee himself is coy about his accomplishment. In true economics teacher mode, he describes his win as a something that “will cause my budget constraint to shift away from the origin and allow me to move to a new indifference curve associated with a higher level of utility.”

On a more serious note, he adds, “The greater satisfaction of it all comes from having my students be able to understand my archaic economic chatter and really start to enjoy learning the concepts of economics. I love teaching economics and the challenges ahead actually add to the excitement.”

Another Kamehameha teacher, Mr. James Chun, is one of the twenty Regional Semi-Finalists who will receive $1,000 for their outstanding and creative efforts at incorporating economics concepts into the classroom. Mr. Chun submitted a lesson plan entitled “The Kapu System: How the Hawaiians dealt with the Tragedy of the Commons” and incorporated a lesson on how the Hawaiians utilized scarce resources during this era.