TWILAP, Two Weeks in the Life of an Accounting Professor. Most people think I only work a few hours per week, just the time spent in the classroom. They aren’t aware of all the behind the scenes activity. In this series, I’ll journalize on what it’s like to be a professor.
Well, the party’s almost over. Day 14 of two weeks. My goals for today are simple.
- Catch up on the e-mail I didn’t get to on Friday.
- Make progress on writing about the Holy Grail of Accounting, a new blog essay.
- Make progress on writing about the accounting theory related to lease accounting, a new blog essay.
5:45-8:15 p.m. E-mail. I assign papers in my Managerial and Cost Accounting courses, and a frequent topic is productivity. Interesting article, “Recession or expansion, U.S. productivity continues to soar.” The author notes that productivity in the U.S. is up 8.1%. Unfortunately, the productivity increase is recession-driven: layoffs mean that companies must do as much or more with fewer workers. The key is to retain productivity gains during and after a recovery. Professor James R. Martin, though, has assembled some data from World Economic Federation publications that reveal American economic competitiveness has steadily improved over the past 10-15 years to its number one ranking.
Over at AECM, a recurring theme is how huge, obscene government spending programs will eventually lead to multi-trillion dollar deficits, a loss of capital investment and eventual loss of productivity. A clever and entertaining song from the popular culture doubt the long-term benefit of stimulus plans:
I don’t know if the following song adds value to any discussion, but it entertaining.
Bob Jensen at AECM informs of a song about Mark to market accounting (fair value accounting). Thanks for the link, Bob.
Bob Jensen also links to a presentation by an invisible woman (Nicole Johnson). Her message is inspiring. She encourages all to continue on, even if the absence of recognition or appreciation. This invisibility is the antidote to pride. She says that we may never live to see the fruits of our labors, nor may we ever get recognized. That doesn’t matter, for God sees. And we see.
8:15-8:45 p.m. Class preparation. I repaired a solution for a HW problem. In this age, all of my materials must be digitized and distributed to students. For Intermediate Accounting I, I have a long syllabus will all policies and justification for those policies, lectures, professor’s lecture notes, homework problems and their solutions, test guides and sample test questions. I’ve been working on digitizing Intermediate Accounting 2 for a longer period of time–over four hundred pages. Intermediate Accounting 1 is only at 250 pages. I’m only part of the way through the conversion process.
8:45-10:45 p.m. Scholarly work. Instead of continuing with Accounting’s Holy Grail, I started writing, In Defense of PCAOB. This is because at 8:45 p.m., I didn’t feel like I had a sufficiently large enough block of time to get organized and then write something significant. Life is like that. Academics need large blocks of uninterrupted time. When we don’t get them, there’s always some filler activity to work on.
Then I stopped working and watched a video. It had nothing to do with either accounting or being a professor. It wasn’t even something I’d ever admit to watching. But it was funny in parts.
Debit and credit – – David Albrecht
The Summa 
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