It was a simple question, I thought. Worth 30 points on an Intermediate Accounting final exam, I was expecting a yes or no answer with appropriate reasoning. Knock my socks off, I asked them.

The rest of the world uses FIFO, but does not permit LIFO.
Should the U.S. continue to use LIFO?

Little was I prepared for one student’s response, “Meh, no.”

I could have handled mais oui (yes, with emphasis) or mais non (no) because I took French in ninth grade. I still remember, “Je ne parle pas Français,” but prefer to say, “Mais, non,” when asked if I speak French.

It might have been better for the student to answer a yes or no type of question with either oui or non, but he didn’t. He responded meh.

Dare I admit I didn’t know what it means? Refusing to admit guilt (hey, the SEC doesn’t require it from crooks paying fines and damages for committing fraud), I asked my colleagues on AECM (e-mail listserv for accounting professors) if they knew what it meant.

No one did, but two looked it up:

Indifference; to be used when one simply does not care.

The folks on AECM went on for a while about the need to use proper English in school (and later on in professional life), but I think they missed the point. It’s a word that is commonly used to communicate a specific meaning. And when used in a formal setting, adds emphasis!!!!!!! At least no one gave me a series of exclamation points.

The student could have mounted a spirited defense of meh, arguing that in an era of convergence (or lack there of), it simply doesn’t matter. Or perhaps LIFO is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Unfortunately, the student wandered around for a couple hundred words, then turned to other questions on the exam.

If the SEC ever polls us on whether we should keep GAAP, the survey instrument better have four boxes to check:

by David Albrecht

This post was originally published at The Summa on December 21, 2011.

Clever Wording

Almost everyone I’ve ever met in the United States writes badly.  Most teachers and professors agree, because they know first hand how poorly students write–students who are about to be released into the wild.

Bob Jensen, emeritus accounting professor, recently passed along a link to an article written by Ben Yagoda, “The Elements of Clunk,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 2, 2012.  Professor Yagoda writes,

Four years ago, I wrote an essay for The Chronicle Review cataloging “The Seven Deadly Sins of Student Writers“—the errors and infelicities that cropped up most frequently in my students’ work. Since then a whole new strain of bad writing has come to the fore, not only in student work but also on the Internet, that unparalleled source for assessing the state of the language.

Consider:

For our one year anniversary, my girlfriend and myself are going to a Yankees game, with whomever amongst our friends can go. But, the Weather Channel just changed their forecast and the skies are grey, so we might go with the girl that lives next door to see the movie, “Iron Man 2″.

Those two hypothetical sentences contain 11 [mistakes].

Jensen then quotes a passage from Auntie Bev, of Ft. Lauderdale,

1. The bandage was wound around the wound.
2. The farm was used to produce produce.
3. The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4. We must polish the Polish furniture.
5. He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6. The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
7. Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
8. A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
9. When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10. I did not object to the object.
11. The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12. There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13. They were too close to the door to close it.
14. The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15. A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16. To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17. The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
18. Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
19. I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
20. How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?

A few of these clever wordings are so admirable, I would be proud for them to appear in one of my blogs.

by David Albrecht

 

A Professor Who Is Savvy in Social Media

Yesterday I was informed of a nice honor.  I was on a list of the 50 Most Social Media Savvy Professors in America.

I have written, both here and on The Summa, about the importance of integrating social media into the work life.  Whether a person is a professor, student, or business professional, using social media can make one both more efficient and more effective.

Am I deserving of such an honor?  Absolument pas!  Perhaps I’m only #500.

However, I’m grateful for being recognized. Thanks.

by David Albrecht

Should Attendance Be Required In College?

This question has sparked a lengthy discussion on the HETL group on LinkedIn.  I mounted a spirited defense in the negative.

Best line I’ve heard?

Well, as a colleague (Pres. of University of Phoenix Online) noted: ”If bums on seats are the major concern for assessing tertiary education, then they are focusing on the wrong end of the student!”

by David Albrecht

If Rodney Was Alive Today

The purpose of this blog post is humor.  There’s nothing educational about it.

I miss Rodney Dangerfield. Although he and I never met, I feel a certain kinship with him.  He was the comedian for those with self-esteem issues (“I don’t get no respect.”).  I loved him in Caddyshack.

The following statements, sent to me by a friend, remind me of Rodney Dangerfield.  At least two are Rodney-worthy.  Enjoy!

The economy is so bad that. . .

• I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.
• CEO’s are now playing miniature golf.
• Exxon-Mobil laid off 25 congressmen.
• Angelina Jolie adopted a child from America.
• Motel 6 won’t leave the light on anymore.
• A picture is now worth only 200 words.
• They renamed Wall Street Wal-Mart Street.
• I called the suicide hotline and got a call center in Pakistan. When I told them I was suicidal they got all excited and asked if I could drive a truck.

by David Albrecht

 

The Value of Writing

Over on the HETL (Higher Education Teaching & Learning) group at LinkedIn, other professors and I engage in stimulating and worthwhile discussions.  HETL is a remarkable group, now with almost 10,000 professors from around the world.

For the past two weeks, a number of us have participated in a discussion titled simply, “Testing or Writing.”  Tonight, Dr. John Griffin (Oklahoma City University) contributed this quotable statement:

Memorization and repetition is useful, but the process of writing causes us to struggle with many concepts, and mentally test connections and meanings. This is the meaningfulness that I believe is so valuable. It adds breadth and depth to our knowledge set. Writing adds color to our black and white, simplistic knowledge. It forces our brains to burn newer neurons and make more/richer connections with existing schemas; all of which is beneficial.

Amen.

Writing requires serious thinking.  Indeed, the process of writing causes us to come to decide what it is that we think.  It is not a mistake to say that by writing we can figure out just what it is that we think.  In olden days, it was called thinking on paper.  Since we don’t use paper anymore, perhaps it could be called thinking on the word processor.  Nah, doesn’t have the same ring.

by David Albrecht

On-line Typos Cost Millions

Is it mispelling or misspelling?  You’re, your, or yer?  There, their, or they’re?  I point out writing errors when I grade, but many students shrug off my corrections with, “Oh, it’s a harmless little typo.”

I require written work by students in every course I teach, and have for many years.  I don’t recall ever getting a clean manuscript.  Errors abound, each provoking a physiological or emotional response within me.  Students have turned in papers with so many typos that I am medicated for high blood pressure.

Students don’t seem to realize that collegiate writing assignments are opportunities for learning to write for life.  Instead, many think that writing assignments are intended by the professor to inflict needless inconvenience and annoyance.  Being marked down for typos is unfair, because they are too insignificant to matter.

Virginia Heffernan, a columnist to the Opinionator blog at the New York Times, disagrees.  On Sunday, July 17, she blogged about, “The Price of Typos.”  We won’t tell her about the typo in her title.  Having a doctorate in English instead of accounting, she doesn’t seem to realize that cost would have been the correct term to use.

Rushing to publish and overlooking glaring typos may have become part of the new economics of traditional publishing. But on the Web, typos sometimes come with a price. “Spelling mistakes ‘cost millions’ in lost online sales,” said a BBC headline last week. The article cited an analysis of British Web figures that suggested that a single spelling mistake on an e-commerce site can hurt credibility so much that online revenues fall by half.

While the idea that sloppy spelling can sink whole businesses seems far-fetched, even casual bloggers recognize the imperative to spell well online. This is because search engines look for strings of characters in sequence, and if your site has misspellings, Google is less likely to list it at the top of search results. With misspellings, according to the tech site Geekosystem, “You aren’t going to get nearly as many hits as you deserve.” The imperative to spell correctly on the Web, and attract Google attention, means that even the lowliest content farmer will know that it’s i-before-e in “Bieber.”

Although good writing is important for professionals, it cannot take place without an error-free foundation.

by David Albrecht

 

Brilliant Examples of Student Writing

Retired accounting professor (emeritus – Trinity University) and good friend Bob Jensen occasionally sends me some humor collected from around the web.  Here is what he sent me today.

Good metaphor writing as shown below may be harder than writing an accountics paper for TAR.

Forwarded by Paula

Why English Teachers Die Young

Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country.

Here are last year’s winners…

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country< BR>speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. Instead of 7:30.
12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. Traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m., at a speed of 35 mph.
15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.
16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

Please leave a comment if you have any new contributions to add.

by David Albrecht

Dyscalculia

When I teach Managerial Accounting, I emphasize to students that in many areas of business it is necessary to read numbers and understand the patterns that are present.   I have always wondered why some very smart students who study are unable to do either one.   Perhaps it is due to dyscalculia.

Two fundamental skills underlie almost everything I do in the course:

1. Starting with the average cost for some amount of units and then calculating the resulting total cost, and vice versa.
2. Identifying the pattern inherent in a sequence of numbers and calculating what would come next, or what came before.

An example of the first skill would be:

If the average cost for 12 units is $2.50, then the total cost for those 12 units is $30.

Another example would be:

If the total cost for 11 units is $33, then the average cost per unit is $3.

The task seems simple.  But there are very smart students at the universities I’ve taught at, and a significant percentage have great difficulty with it.   Students will spend a lot of time in memorization for this type of problem soon to appear on a test, but they never truly get it.

An example of the second skill is found when I lay out the following sequences and ask students to fill in the missing values.  Can you figure out what are the missing values?

The answers are:

The task seems simple.  But there are very smart students at the universities I’ve taught at, and a significant percentage have great difficulty with it.

I know that many accounting professors ridicule students who can’t perform either task, claiming that students deserve bad grades because they never put in the study time to learn what is necessary.  Not me.  I’ve always thought that there is a missing piece to the puzzle of easy problems that are unsolvable for some smart college students.

Yesterday on AECM we started talking about dyscalculia.  Dyscalculia is similar to dyslexia and dysgraphia.  Dyscalculia is the inability to identify numbers, distinguish number patterns, and perform arithmetic operations.  Dyslexia is the inability to identify letters, distinguish letter patterns (i.e., words), and comprehend what is read.  Dysgraphia is the inability to write.  Some people can read very well, but have not learned to write.

Students with a bad case of dyscalculia will have difficulty in identifying the numbers in the following image.

The current thinking is that these are not physical or intellectual incapacities, but rather they are functional or learning difficulties.  All can be overcome.  Dyslexia, which probably affects 5-10% of the American population has received much attention.  But so has dyscalculia, which is thought to afflict a similar percentage of the population.  To see the range of exercises available to combat this learning problem with numbers, visit dyscalculia.org.

Professors, it might be appropriate to refer some students to your campus disabilities office.

To learn more about dyscalculia, please read this wikipedia article.

By David Albrecht.

I Am Worried About My Grade

All professors & instructors can relate to the video, “I Am Worried About My Grade.”  We get it all the time.  Give a student a lower grade than what the student wants, and much of the time the student will march into your office demanding a better grade.  Oh, sometimes it is couched in terms of a request, but the tone of request reveals it is a demand.

I’ve taught at public universities and private colleges, and it seems to me that demanding students are worse at private colleges.

I found this video on YouTube.  I did not create it.  It does seem to strike a cord, though.

by David Albrecht