Professor Elam

Friday August 29, 2014

We usually confine this space to links about accounting and business. But for the start of the semester let's use the end of the first week for a bit of reflection. 

Yes we had the usual fits and starts of getting on line at various sites. We inundated you with resources in the syllabus and among various posts under Course Content on Black Board. Use this four day weekend to explore all of them, now, You should be picking an choosing your arsenal of resources to Conquer the course. I can only suggest and guide, you must take action. 

 I have been reading books on how we learn and what is the future of education. I mentioned  Kahn Academy in one class this week. Even though many of you are parents near no one had ever heard of it. Click on the link to learn more, now. 

Kahn Academy was kick started with a million dollar grant from Bill Gates who was impressed wtih Salman Kahn's on line prowess of delivering education. The site has been particularly successful in teaching math, a topic that still eludes most public schools. So many public schools are now using Kahn Academy. 

Success drove Salman Khan to write The One World School House; Education Reimagined. All this began with Salman coaching his neice on math by long distance. He was successful using a computer tablet to demonstrate problem solving techniques. That finally morphed into Khan Academy. That book is available in the Alamo Public LIbraries.

One of his good points in the book is that decades ago the idea of Content Mastery took hold in public schools. The idea is that one should never be moved to the next or higher level of comprehension until one masters the first level. Sadly this idea has lost ground. 

Where am I going with this?  Well, as always I began the financial accounting class, 3310 3311 3312 with basic spreadsheet problems. As always I learned a lot about the group by watching your faces as we explored the problem. What I learned was that this is that adjusting entries and a ten column worksheet are new material to most of you. This makes me wonder what you studied in your first two accounting classes. But this is nothing new or unique to this semester. 

This past spring I gave the SAME adjusting entry quiz to the graduate class that I gave to the intro 3310 class. The average score in the graduate class was three out of thirteen. That is correct, 24% correct, which means they really knew nothing about book keeping. This is why they are still struggling, they never learned book keeping in the first place. 

This is why in football terms we are starting with blocking and tackling, the basics. We provided the answers to the entries on the pastina problem for you. But it is up to you to start all over on the blank spreadsheet and determine if you can make the entries yourself. 

I just recalled teaching the intro to college course at Tx State. They required a six week orientation class on how to go to college. One lad told me that he had studied more for  his first college exam than he had studied in all four years of high school. Sadly he was no doubt telling the truth. 

And the truth was he knew nothing about how to study or prepare for an exam. He had been handed the answers all through high school on the Holy Grail of no one left behind, graduate all who enter. Studying means 

reading the chapter

Writing copious notes and lists of things to remember

the spiceland text contains solved problems as does the Schaums series I recommend. Yet most students fail to atempt to solve those problems on a blank piece of paper. Until you can do that you are not learning accounting.

come to class with questions about what you do not understand. then attempt to workthe problems again

Yet most students

do not read the book

do not work either the solved problems which should lead to mastery of the brief exercises

they copy answers off the board not having read the problem which means they learn nothing as they are not familiar with the question

Failure to adopt a proper study plan is the result of schools over coaching students by simply providing the test beforehand, if that is the case after a while students decide there is no point in reading the text as they have the test in hand. I don't doubt that but that will not be the way forward from now on.

Okay that is 750 words the length of the average newspaper column. So I will conclude. We will be discussing the difference between book keeping, our ten column spreadsheet and the much larger world of accounting and finance.  

I will be posting my weekly newspaper column, yes it appears in two newspapers and has for years, on Sunday. This is a demonstration of the practicality of managerial accounting. We will also discuss Miss Mary Bobo's Boarding House in class, it really is a great application of managerial accounting in the restaurant business.

Keep logging on here, I will be posting throughout the weekend.