David Ricardo's Blog

I plan to craft my post around the traditional final prompt I both enjoyed the structure of this class and think that the layout is conducive to learning at a college level. I think that this course was planned out with a good insight into how college students operate. In general the class seemed to present the students with the opportunity to get as much out of it as they were willing to put into it. There was a minimal amount of monitoring, there was no required attendance, there were soft deadlines and the traditional form of monitoring (in class exams and quizzes) wasn't used at all. Despite all of these typical structures being absent, I feel like I learned a lot about organizations in this class. The class discussions and lectures were productive and engaging. The excel homework expanded into specifics and practical situations beyond the theory discussed in class. The blog posts allowed those that didn't attend class or those too shy to speak up to share their thought

This variation of the principle-agent model is actually a significant problem that I faced when working as a swim instructor a few summers ago. The two principles that I had at the time were my boss who coordinated the private lessons that we scheduled, the parents of the children that I was teaching. These private lessons were scheduled to be half an hour and the parent is instructed to pay before entering the pool. Each lesson is a flat rate with no discounts given for multiple lessons. It is also the same rate for multiple children to be in the same lesson. As the agent, I was expected to be there 15 minutes early to collect equipment, formulate a lesson plan and then mark out an area of the pool for the lesson to take place in. The pool had to be claimed, because these lessons often occurred during free swim hours at the pool. The conflict between the principles idea of high and low effort usually revolved around the amount of time that the lesson consumed. Even with the 15 minut