Coworker Woes in New Beginnings

At my previous company, I encountered a very annoying problem. Specifically, I had a coworker who thought he was my boss. I’ve just recently discovered that the inverse-photonegative of that situation is just as aggravating. In other words, I have a coworker for whom I’m responsible, but I’m not her manager.

It wouldn’t be so bad were she…competent. I don’t want to say it like that. Let’s back up. I was so excited to hire her. I took over the program chair position last fall semester after the previous chair left, but we weren’t able to find a replacement for my old position. The end result was my teaching an extraordinarily heavy load. I was chomping at the bit to get another back to help carry the burden for spring semester. We interviewed about a dozen applicants, but only two stood out. I was amazed how many of them were already teachers, but had seemingly no interpersonal skills. I thought most teachers were extroverts. Apparently, the opposite is true. Most teachers are those who are happy to be left alone with their thoughts, books, and intellectual pursuits; in short, we’re introverts who have overcome the fear of public speaking. Of that last candidate pool, ten of them had only overcome their fear of embarrassment. Their mock presentations were dry, unengaging, and one fellow didn’t even run his PowerPoint presentation. He just left it in Edit mode while he lectured.

Only two candidates gave legitimately good presentations. Cynthia, an older woman who I guess is in her 60s and a younger guy, probably in his mid 30s. While both had PhDs, Cynthia gave the more polished lecture. Cynthia also lives about an hour a way where as the man lived in another part of the country. He said he was willing to relocate, but I was concerned he’d eventually change his mind and back out, so I made Cynthia my top choice.

Cynthia officially started on December 1st. I set up her courses, gave her access to my materials, including lectures, workbooks solutions, Kahoot review games, and exams). I don’t think I gave her a tough load, though the first semester teaching always has some growing pains. I gave her Financial Accounting I, Managerial Accounting, Individual Tax Accounting, Spreadsheet Applications, and Computerized Accounting. All the materials for those courses were already completed. She only had to do the following:

1. Financial Accounting: familiarize herself with the material
2. Computerized Accounting: familiarize herself with the material. Just start doing the chapter examples in the book so that she’s ahead of the students.
3. Individual Tax Accounting: Update the lectures for 2021. Certain amounts get adjusted for inflation each year, so just update those. Also, familiarize herself with the material
4. Spreadsheet Applications: Familiarize herself with the material; Find some textbook examples to work in class with the students and prepare her lectures off those.
5. Managerial Accounting: This is the one course that needs to be made from “scratch.” We switched to a new textbook. The publisher gave us PowerPoint slides, but they’re very skeletal, so they need to be fleshed out. I updated the workbook last semester, but she needs to do put its solutions in Excel.

All the complaints seem to be coming from her ACCT 1100 class. I gave her all my lectures and workbook solutions, so it was the most completed when I passed it off to her. The course is structured so that a chapter takes up two classes, maybe three. In one, the instructor lectures. In the other, the instructor demonstrates and assigns problems in the workbook. Teach the concepts, then show the application, if that makes sense. The lectures area all in PowerPoint, and the workbook solutions are all in Excel. For the latter, I changed the font color to white to match the background. When going over the workbook problems, you just change a cell’s font color to black to show the solution. I’ve had to explain to her several times how to change the font color. A couple of students complained to me that she gets off track, gives the wrong answers in class, and seems confused about the material she’s teaching. I mean, this is Financial Accounting One, the most basic of our courses! Managerial Accounting is structured the same way, but it only meets once a week, and she’s had to create that course’s materials on her own. I shudder to think what’s going on in that class.
Maybe that’s why no one has complained. Because she had to dive in and start building that class’s materials, it forced her to become familiar with it. I really hope that she just struggling with Financial Accounting I because she thought that since it was already intact, she didn’t have to give it much preparation.

Cynthia can at least be salvaged (I hope). The same can’t be said for the adjunct who made me look like a class 10 A-hole at the start of the semester. Our degree program includes a law class called “Legal Environment of Business.” I’m technically credentialed to teach it since I took a business law class in graduate school, but I’m an accountant, not an attorney, so I’m not the best option. We had a local attorney, Mark, who was our only really viable option for teaching the class. I think Mark got too comfortable in the COVID crisis. All classes were converted to online at the midpoint of last spring semester, and the online format continued for all classes that summer. Mark seems to have developed a taste for getting a paycheck while sitting at home. He wanted to continue just teaching online in the fall, but not all students have the GPAs to take online classes, so we needed it to be face-to-face. When he couldn’t have his way, he declined to teach at the last minute, and we had to scramble to find a replacement.

October comes, he sends me an email that he wants to teach the class on campus this Spring. I agree and give him his request. Then, two days after the semester starts, he sends me an email saying that he can’t teach because he still doesn’t feel comfortable with COVID. Where was this reservation in the previous three months when I would have had time to find a replacement?

It gets better. I get a slew of emails every day, and only so many are pertinent to me. This one slipped right by me, so I wasn’t aware that he had declined until the night his class was scheduled and no one showed up. Students complained, the Dean was notified, and I got my butt chewed out. One nicety about the Dean is that while he can get salty when disturbed, I think he can quickly feel bad about becoming so volatile and acts overly nice immediately thereafter. It turns out, this isn’t the first time Mark has pulled a stunt like this one. A few years ago, he backed out of another full-time position after the semester had started for some reason or another. Dean and the Vice President made it clear that Mark will not get another contract to teach.