Over the weekend I had some spare time, namely sitting at the lounge for two hours on Friday and Sunday, while my younger daughter was having public skating sessions.
I spent that time reading up the materials on my Financial Accounting I (the exam for which I already took on Wednesday). I knew that some of the stuff I missed before the exam was critical for me to learn, because it is going to be essential foundation block for my Financial Accounting II course and subsequent classes in Finance.
In particular I went through Financial Statement Analysis with emphasis on Risk Analysis. I realized how much important, and interesting too, stuff I had missed before. I felt that I had been sort of deprived by the way the course was taught.
In the classes I had been given some seemingly unrelated blobs of problems cranking without proper introduction and conclusion that would tie it all together in one complete and even somewhat beautiful picture that Financial Accounting really is becoming in my eyes the more I get involved with it.
Admittedly, the syllabus excerpt I have quoted before was trying to compensate for that shortcoming of the class experience. But when you are pressed for time and have to choose between reading, and problem solving, and preparing for exam, and just trying to envelope your brain around these relatively new ideas without real prior exposure to them – it may become overwhelming. And you may make less productive choices.
All in all, I realize that I am ultimately responsible for my learning and getting maximum possible from my MBA program. At the same time I know I would really appreciate if the instructor used more ‘holistic’ approach to the subject in class.
By the way, the book that we are using in this class, and it will be used in Financial Accounting II, is a pretty well written and solid to my liking. I am really impressed with it and in a way even grateful to the authors for showing me the beauty of Financial Accounting that I was not able to fully appreciate in class.
Financial Accounting: An Introduction to Concepts, Methods and Uses (Hardcover) ISBN-10: 0324651147, ISBN-13: 978-0324651140
May be I just need to learn to study again after all those years out of school. Even though I have been doing some intense learning for professional certifications in my occupation in the last four years, it is quite different from the graduate level studies.
In IT certifications field learning is more mechanical and formalized. It does not really require abstract thinking and analysis. Just to know a bunch of technologies and general principles of managing them, plus memorizing some basic computations, like raising 2 to the 8th power. The most important skill in IT field itself is to be able to properly coin the search phrase for Google and you can find answer to pretty much any technical issue.
With MBA classes I have taken so far it was not quite so. Sure, you can look up many concepts on the internet, but in most cases you will not be able to find exact answer to your specific problem. One needs to think and find the way to apply those concepts to particular problems.
By the way this issue of getting back in the habit and mode of studying is true not only for me because of my age. I have heard this from quite a few of my younger classmates ( in their late twenties). Even they refer to it as a challenge because they have been out of college for four to six years.
Imagine then how much more lamenting I am entitled to because I got my undergraduate eighteen years ago. 
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