The Origin of Dr. Tremendous

It was an accident.

My last name is Treme, and for years, autocorrect had opinions about that. Students would start an email with "Dr. Treme," and their phones would helpfully finish it: "Dr. Tremendous."

It happened often enough that it stopped being a typo and became a running joke. Eventually, it became a name I just answered to.

By the time I started building teaching tools, the name was already there.

I'm an economist. I teach applied microeconomics, build courses, and direct an undergraduate program. I am not a programmer by training.

But I have always had ideas about how economics should be taught: what students need to see, what they should try to predict before the answer is revealed, and which moments of confusion are worth creating because they lead to understanding.

For most of my career, many of those ideas stayed ideas. The distance between imagining a teaching tool and actually building one required a team, a budget, and technical skills I did not have.

For the first time, I can get much closer to the thing I imagined.

The economics and the teaching are mine. I still revise, test, and get help, but the first version no longer has to stay in my head.

So I started making the things I wished I had.

Every tool here does the same thing: it takes a solution that once lived in a model, a spreadsheet, or my own head, and makes it visible. A market mechanism, a degree path, a decision rule, a trade-off.

Most of these tools started with a specific teaching problem in one of my courses.

• A grocery store where students discover why a fertilizer shock reaches butter but barely touches bread.
• A supply-and-demand market you can hear, where a shortage climbs and a surplus sags.
• A degree planner that holds four years of advising logic, so students can walk in ready to talk about where they are going instead of which box to check next.

None of these were available off the shelf. If I wanted them to exist, I had to make them.

And it turns out that making things students can actually use is the most fun I have had in this job.

Dr. Tremendous is simply the name that stuck.