I have no complaint with teachers at Marshall University, with the exception of two.

The first one was a male teacher in the Accounting Department.  He would preach one thing and do something complete different.

Everyone dreaded in having him, some even refused to take his class and pray that the next semester someone else would teach that section.

His classes were so slow because he just read the book to us.  After ever sentence he would say the sentence again, but reword it.

One day he asked us, “If we put a side walk to this land, should we depreciate it”?

No one said anything, so I said, “Yes”.

He then told me that I was wrong, “Sidewalk cost should be considered land development because a sidewalk is made out of concrete and concrete last forever.”

Nothing last forever besides land.  We students could not believe that he made such a basic accounting rule blunder - only that doesn't depreciate is land.

A few months later he gave us a lecture on how we need to read the book before we come to class.  He told us how he sits down in his office, reads the material once, thinks about it, and then reads it again to fully comprehend the material.  After ten minutes of him preaching, he says, “Rocco, what chapter are we in?”

Then later in that class, I cannot remember exactly what we were talking about but I think it dealt with the trade-in value of different assets with a boot (cash).  He did the problem on the over-head projector and I told him that he was wrong.  He glared at me.  Then a fellow student, Jamie, said, “Rocco is right.”  I then showed him the page and paragraph in the book on what to do.  I could not believe my ears when I heard him say, “Looks like Rocco is right and I was wrong.”

This teacher lost all my respect when I needed him to sign something because I was putting an application for an internship with the FBI.  He said he will have it done on this date, but when I went to go get it, he said that he has not had a chance to review it and that I could get it during his normal office hours in two days.  He did not show up.  The deadline for the application was that day and I called the FBI local office and I told them, that I have not received my letter (had to be written by a specific person,) back yet and that I did everything that I could do to get it.  She said not to worry about it; she will take note of it and look at it later.  The next day, I finally get the paper off him, then I ran to the post office so I could get the post date.  At the post office, I read the letter before I stuck it in the packet and I was horrified that he dated his signature three days earlier, the day that I should have picked it up the first time.  To this day, I wonder if I did not get that FBI internship because they thought I was lying to them.

The other accounting students lost his respect when he told another teacher that the reason his students do bad in his class is not because of him, but because of her.  (She taught Intermediate I and he taught Intermediate II). This was not true.

The other teacher, taught Accounting Information Systems.  She did not know a thing about Microsoft Access and that was the main program that they class used.  The book we had contained pictures and examples of Office Access 97, while the college computers had the newest version, Office Access 2000.  We had to figure some of the problems out ourselves because the program environment was not the same.

I was one of the few that actually did the homework.  You could print naked pictures and she would never know because her grad assistant graded all the papers and he didn’t care either.  I had a problem on one and I asked her about it during class.  She asked me if I read the book and I told her I did.  Then she told me to read it again and maybe I would figure it out.  I told her that it was no where in the book.  Her reply, “Rocco, if you read the book then you should know how to do it”.  “I did.”  Then she got really upset at yelled.  After class, Amanda told me that she too had the same problem, but she asked a friend that was a Access genius what was wrong.  All I need was a comma in formula.

Also in Accounting Information System, we had to draw Flowcharts in Microsoft Word.  She said, “I think it will be fun if we do one of these”.  It took forever, she didn’t know where or what the Draw Toolbar was.  Then when she did draw the stuff, she couldn’t figure out make the line bold, dotted, or even adjust the length and position of the line.  I told her that she need to right click on the line, go to properties, then . . .

“ROCCO, Don’t make me look like a fool up here” was her reply.

(She was a fool)

It is sad to say this, but I have seen other college professors not know rudimentary computer stuff.  I.E. send email with an attachment.  We had another accounting teacher that one day decided to add something up on the overhead projector computer by using Excel.  He did not know that you had to hit ‘+’ or ‘=’ before a calculation or the cell will look like this ‘5+5+5+5” .  (Looking back, Lotus does not require you to enter a function either, but the college computers did not have Lotus installed.)

November 12, 2006