I’m in something of an odd position with my Financial
Accounting course. There are parts of my
text book which make no sense to me at all.
Now, I’m not a stupid person, but this particular course is making me
feel that way. I used to work as a reporter,
and part of my job was covering stories concerning national and state budgets,
business news and school board bonding issues.
I was able to dissect complicated bills and laws and break them down
into plain language that everybody could understand. Financial Accounting…that’s another story.
I don’t think it’s just me.
The first chapter of the textbook, Financial
Accounting: The Impact on Decision
Makers talks about various financial statements and shows a couple of
examples, but doesn’t go into any detail about how to actually put one
together. At the end of each chapter,
the student is supposed to work on a number of problems as part of the Self
Check. However, the Self Check at the
end of Chapter One is all about assembling these financial statements. If they didn’t show me how to do it, how am I
supposed to construct one? There was
actually an answer in the textbook which read “although this wasn’t covered in
this chapter, the answer is…”. If it isn’t
covered in the chapter, how would I know the answer in the first place?
In my opinion, there is probably a much better textbook
which can explain financial accounting better than Financial Accounting. This
is actually the first course I have taken with Penn
Foster College
in which I have been disappointed in the text book.
I am trying a different approach in studying from this text
book. I am going to read all four
chapters in the first lesson, and then go back and try to work the Self Check
problems before taking my first online exam.
Perhaps by reading all of the chapters first, I’ll have a better idea of
how to work the Self Check problems.
I also realized that there is a supplemental text to this
course, which is only available through the Penn Foster student portal. It is 189 pages long, so it is also a big
part of this course. The supplemental
text is basically an answer key for some of the practice questions, but it
still doesn’t offer solutions on how to actually work the problems; it just
gives the answers. I’m going to
supplement my learning in this course with some free online accounting
resources I found through Google. That
may help me at least pick up some of the basic concepts I’m supposed to be
learning in this course.
On to Chapter 3. I
hope to take my first online exam this next week.