Deposits

There are three basic types of deposit accounts – savings, current (or demand or checking), and fixed (or time or term) account. They are common, general knowledge I never thought that I’d ever have to explicitly “teach” to first year undergraduates. Yet, I found out that they were not, in fact, so common knowledge; at least not to the few students I met last week.

Their excuse was that they never “learned” about them in school, which got me wondering for a moment how the rest of us got to know about the deposits.

The group of students basically set camp in my office for three days leading to their final exam paper last Friday. Instead of asking specific questions, the first thing they did when they entered my office on the first day was to ask me to re-teach them some of the topics covered in class during the semester.

“Where were you during the semester, playing hooky?”
“No sir, we attended all your classes!”
“And did what, daydreaming?”
“No, we were paying very close attention, trying very hard to understand your lectures”
“Trying to understand?”

So they had problems with English. Although we are an English (and Arabic)-speaking university, unfortunately a lot of the students (and in actual fact administrative and academic staff too) have serious problems with the English language.

Of course, there was no way I was going to just re-teach them the topics. Instead, I asked them to explain to me whatever they understood, while leading them along the way by asking questions. In the end, interestingly, we found out that they had actually got most of the stuff, requiring me to just fill in some gaps and then summarize the topics.

I hope they did well in the exam.

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PS: The question on the types of deposits came about when they asked me what a time deposit was. I refused to tell them and told them that I would not proceed until they figured it out one way or another, so one of them took out her mobile and asked her father.