Teaching Two Courses This Semester

For many years, I taught as an Adjunct Professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU), and since the Covid lockdown, I have been teaching remotely at Baruch College. As an adjunct, I fill in when a regular professor is unavailable. As luck would have it, I have been tag-teaming and teaching at both of these fine colleges. I will teach courses at both colleges for the coming semester. The semester starts this week.

I am looking forward to the two courses, irrespective of the added effort and time commitment. I will teach the Baruch course in the classroom, where I will interact with the students and, hopefully, fire their imaginations. Yeah, imaginations. Accounting is not all spreadsheets and numbers. To prove it, look at any public company’s financial statement and count the pages with numbers and those primarily with words. There will be five or six pages with numbers and at least 30 pages with words – in some cases, many more. Count them! A lot of creativity goes into preparing that annual report.

In some respects, both of these courses have a very high impact on students. Auditing skills provide an entrance ticket to how a business operates, its systems and controls, and its supply chain being reviewed, documented and tested. Nothing teaches about how a business operates better than auditing its financial statements, underlying records, transactions, and a careful review of its internal controls, which also receive a separate audit opinion. I find everything about auditing exciting, and love to share my feelings with the students.

The managerial accounting course is one of the very few college courses that students can immediately put their learning into effect on the first day of their first job. I divided the course into four sections. The Basics, The Techniques, The Application, and How to Jump Start Your Career. I can almost guarantee they will walk out of each class session excited!

My overall teaching method is to provide real-world relevance to the lessons. For each course, the students must choose a public company 10-K, which I use as practical examples.

For auditing, we spend a good part of the first session reviewing the auditor’s report almost word for word. We also spend considerable time comparing the textbook material to the numbers in parenthesis in the balance sheet and with the comments in the notes to financial statements. At the end of the course, I explain how to analyze any financial statement in seven minutes – with a three-hour class!

In the managerial accounting course, we spend our time on the statements of operations and cash flows, as well as the supplementary information in the 10-K. In the auditing course, more time is devoted to the balance sheet. I have taught the 10-K analysis in CPE programs for seasoned CPAs, and many return each time I teach it, so they must get value from it. We will also delve between the lines in some of the notes to financial statements. The students will learn how to use and apply the financial data they receive, as well as the data’s timeliness. Nowadays, almost everything is in real-time. I will also share how identifying three or four Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can provide a thorough understanding of what is occurring right now, and then use them as Key Predictive Indicators.

Each student will use a different company’s report. The object is to illustrate that while each company is different, the disclosures, principles and techniques are similar. I want the students to realize that what I teach is real-world stuff. Also, I believe it makes the course more fun and certainly more interesting for me.

Students in both courses will learn about my two-minute trend analysis technique and how to apply ratios quickly and effectively.

I enjoy teaching and get satisfaction from giving back and inspiring young people to become accountants, entrepreneurs or managers. I also get the pleasure of providing the students with tools they could use throughout their careers.

I could write much more about what I am teaching and the value to the students. I wrote a book about this, titled Memoirs of a CPA, which is available in Kindle and print editions at Amazon.com. Buy it, read it and enjoy it! This is not an unabashed pitch for my book, which is free for Kindle Unlimited members.