One of my best students asked me if her answer was OK. After reciting the book definition...
Student: ... and improves fixed order quanity systems.
Steve: I didn't cover "fixed order quantity systems." Do you have any idea what that means?
Student: No, but it was in the book and I memorized it.
Students here have learned from an early age to memorize and forget. It's so contrary to learning that I find it disturbing.
* An example of a perpetual inventory system would be Wal-Mart's ability to track every single thing sold in every single store instantly.
Hey Steve,
ReplyDeleteJust out of curiosity, what example of the perpetual inventory system did you give your students? I'm guessing you didn't only use WalMart, as that's more of a reference for your blog readers to understand. Does one even exist here in the UAE? It seems to me that based on availability of goods (i.e., no consistency), no one in this country has ever studied supply-chain logistics before. :)
One problem that the students have, besides having raised through secondary school to do exactly what you describe, is that they also have a hard time just understanding some concepts at all. I remember tutoring a student at ZU some years ago in accounting, and realized that no wonder she couldn't understand where to put the item 'rent' on a balance sheet, as she had no concept of what it even meant to pay rent, property ownership, landlords, etc. The whole idea was just totally alien to her. So as she couldn't fathom what the concept of rent was, there was no way for her to understand what label to give it from an accounting perspective.
I used Carrefoure. I talked about the old days of taking inventory... physically counting everything once or twice a year. I explained that stores would have shortages because it's hard to watch the inventory level of each item.
ReplyDeleteI explained that when the scanners came in a company can now track how many bananas are sold. That lets them know when to order more AND lets them know about seasonal differences. Maybe more people buy bananas during Ramadan.
I was looking for them to show me that they understood what perpetual inventory was (as compared to periodic) and that it is a huge advantage for stocking, tracking seasonal trends, buying patterns when there's a change in price... I discussed a half dozen advantages in class.
When one of my best students - one who takes notes and asks questions during class - is unable to extrapolate an answer besides looking up the book definition... well, that was a bummer.
Yeah, unfortunately, even with your great explanations and illustrations, for a lot of your students, they probably STILL don't have any clue what inventory is -- especially for girls, it's just not in their bandwidth. I know it's hard to imagine, but a lot of them (even the best ones) don't read newspapers that often, and probably never the business section, and never have had to do a 'personal' inventory of their own stuff, see when they are running low, etc -- for a lot of them, that's the househelp's job. I found, when teaching, that when explaining a very unfamiliar construct, I had to first find an analogy at a very basic level that they might encounter at home -- restocking their family's food supply, for example. Not perfect, but starting small then working my way up to larger examples helped a lot.
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