Sunday, February 05, 2006

Fall Semester 2004 Mod A - Accounting

At the Cox school of business, they have a regular full-time MBA program and then they have the PMBA program. The P stands for professional. I am in the PMBA program. Each semester is divided up into two modules. Mod A lasts for 8 weeks and Mod B lasts for 8 weeks. In the summer, the mods are cut short by one week, but classes are longer.

Classes are the same for everyone for the first three semesters.

For Fall 2004, I had Financial Accounting, Managerial Economics, Statistics and a couple of no-credit classes ... public speaking and a career management course.

Financial Accounting I

Financial Accounting was not fun. It was a blitz of information, especially for a person who hasn't been to school for 3 years. I remember sitting there in class with my eyes glazed over and wondering what the heck I got myself into. Riffe was the teacher's name. She was a good teacher, but the amount of information was incredible. I did my best on the homework assignments and quizes. Thankfully, she let us make a cheat-sheet for the final. I remember sitting at work watching the Oklahoma v Texas game while working on my sheet. It was a rainy, cold day and I spent about 5 hours working on that paper. It helped me somewhat. I did a little above average on the final.

I ended up with a B in the class.

I really don't remember a whole lot from the class. A lot of that stuff didn't even start to sink in until I took the 2nd financial accounting class.

Chess Update

I am trying to teach my 5-year-old daughter how to play chess. She can set up the board and knows how to move the pieces most of the time. Today we played a game using the pieces on the BabasChess interface ... we were just sitting at the computer when we decided to play. So I took off all my major pieces. All I had were my king and pawns. She was supposed to checkmate me. I let her take a lot of my pawns. She failed to stop one of my pawns and I promoted it. Soon, the game was over. I had to tell her that I won ... we're still working on trying to grasp the concept of checkmate, thus the reason for today's game. When she realized that she had lost, she got really upset. I told her that to be a good sport means that you are nice even when you lose. You are always supposed to shake the other person's hand and thank him or her for playing. She absolutely refused and was being a big stinker about it. I knew she was lacking sleep and that was the main reason for the temper, but I wanted a lesson to be learned.

I explained over and over again that everyone wins and loses in life. That it is OK to lose and that when you lose, you need to be happy for the other person and congradulate them on the game or at least thank them. I told her that it's OK to cry, but that you still need to shake the other person's hand and be a good sport. It took about 15 minutes of explaining and a couple of timeouts (for her to think about it) before she finally calmed down. By the time that was all over with, she was still a little shaken up about the loss. I let it go for the time being.

Later, I had been upstairs reading for my negotiations class. I went downstairs and she came up to me and gave me a big hug and then stuck out her hand for me to shake it. She smiled and said, "good game, Dad." That made me feel so good. She was sincere about it and said that she was sorry. I gave her a big hug and told her how proud I was of her. It really suprised me that she was big enough to do that. I sure love her! What a great girl!

Next post, I'll write about the dreaded economics class ... ugh!

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