Born Out Of Desperation

Years ago, my wife was tutoring a 19 year old accounting student. Kelly was doing an accounting administration course at a community college, but she wasn’t doing well, and she was becoming desperate. She had asked one of her classmates to help her, but it hadn’t worked out. So she asked my wife. My wife wasn’t having much success, either. Kelly wanted to understand what she was learning, but my wife was unable to explain it. After a while, my wife also became desperate.

So I stepped in to help. I don’t have an accounting background. My only experience with it was a short course I did years ago, but I could still remember the thoughts and reservations I had about accounting at that time, so I could easily relate to Kelly. My wife was in a different situation. After years of accounting experience, her memories had slowly modified to the point where she had no empathy with her.

My idea was to create some kind of interface between Kelly and my highly experienced wife. Verbal explanations weren’t working, and I soon discovered that written explanations were no better. In the end, I came up with my text/diagram format. From then on, I would write up the week’s topic.  Kelly would then spend a minute or so reading it, and after that, she could follow my wife through the tutoring session. It worked like a charm. Kelly went from scoring around 30% in exams to 70% and she was just much happier.

I call my style ‘track’ style. It reminds me of the marks a bulldozer track leaves,  and like a bulldozer, it gets you over the most difficult terrain with ease. Besides that, it gets you on track with the accounting topic.