Byron's "End of Course Assessment"

A little background to help you understand this writing:

Byron is working on his Master's degree in Education through Indiana Wesleyan University. It is done completely online through somethign called, "The Blackboard". During the duration of this last course "The Blackboard" was out of commission for 3+ weeks. Needless to say, it was extremely frustrating to the students.

Here is Byron's Assessment of the course he is just finishing.

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My wife started a blog called "GurneeJourney". It helps to reflect the journey of our life and will be a great tool for reflection in time to come. I have decided to reflect on our class…our journey through this course like this…

This part of our journey has been one of...well, I will just put us all on a bus....the bus carrying us on this journey...a new bus that will take us to our destination. One that has great promise of fancy controls and added luxury...but our new bus broke down. We were left stranded out in the middle of nowhere. We called AAA and their weekend phone service was temporarily out of service. When we tried calling the company that sold us the bus, their salesman had just left for Maui and would not be in for 3 weeks (bad sign). We tried calling our bus agent…..but our cell battery died. We waited around a day or two thinking the new fangled GPS would fix it remotely from some satellite and we could just keep going. After several days and nothing happened we started to get concerned!!

Three days had passed and we began to panic! We had so much to do in life. We could not afford one day let alone three. Somebody was going to have to answer for this! It was not our problem! We paid good money for this bus but there we sat along the road wondering what to do.

We started out walking with our thumbs up hoping for a ride. But no one wanted to pick up the hitchhikers. There were too many of us and “you never know what they might do.” We walked and thumbed...walked and thumbed...walked and thumbed. We kept thumbing for a ride at any given chance or opportunity. Sometimes we would throw up our thumb thinking we heard the noise of a motor. We did it so many times that eventually when a vehicle would pass we would never even look, but just kept walking. As we arrived in the nearest town a week later after constantly trying to thumb rides we found the town had closed down for the weekend. We found a garage that had a tow truck and decided to camp out nearby. We had no food or money and we were getting a little nervous. Without food and water we would starve. We would become unhealthy. If we went too long we might be so far malnourished that our physical, mental and even emotional lives might be damaged. We would never be the same. We woke the next morning to check the garage to see if their tow truck could help us. Much to our dismay it only helped cars and our big bus was much too large. We were told we just needed to wait a little longer, and that they had purchased a bigger truck, but it had not arrived yet. As we waited a mailman came by with some mail. The letter read “Hold on…help is on the way”. We excitedly made our long journey back to our bus. When we arrived, help had not arrived either. Our faith was great! We knew it soon would! We searched through our broken down bus looking for any tidbit to keep is nourished. We found a few things and worked on them. They did not last long. We looked everywhere. Even in the woods and bushes nearby hoping to find something. We were getting anemic. We decided to end our lives. What could be worse?! Even if help came or if another bus came we would not even have the strength to get on that bus or even want to go wherever it was that we had been headed…..we scratched our heads…. where were we headed? A few days more passed. Then almost another week and we were still waiting for help.

It had been almost 3 weeks and we heard a noise… a big noise ….. the noise of a tow truck and maybe some mechanics…wait! NO! It was our old bus! What a welcome site (I mean sight)!! We were so excited and were helped by our bus driver. Wait! Did we even want to get on this bus? Did we want to continue the trip? Yes, we needed to we were told! Everything would be all right! We had lots of tender care given to our deplorable condition. Our minds had become blurred. Our memory weakened. Our thoughts had become jumbled and we had lost a sense of caring. Our health was given a “good shot in the arm”, and our mission became stronger than ever. We must finish this trip and succeed on our mission; for there was more of this journey that lay ahead of us with this old bus – bus number Bb 6.3.