My life as a bookkeeper has lots of lulls…sometimes hours and hours of sitting at a desk, staring at the phone, willing it to ring while at the same time hoping that it won’t. To pass the time more enjoyably, I’ve tried numerous tactics: studying cookbooks (yes, I do actually study cookbooks), finishing the wedding entry in my journal (ha ha), looking up short story contests, doing my couponing…but lately, I’ve been wanting more fulfillment. Not that sitting around answering phones all day isn’t fulfilling, but sometimes a girl just needs more in life than entering bills and cleaning the constant dust swirling around.
Then I remembered something I’d read on our church building’s bulletin board about free online classes through byu (elearn.byu.edu) and decided to check it out. I was a bit skeptical at trying some of the classes (like, for example, how on earth is an online intermediate swimming class going to work? Virtual reality?), but got a little bit excited when I saw some of the other options: personal enrichment courses on values like honesty and self-discipline, religious study, finance, family history, politics…it seemed too good to be true that I could keep up with my constant goal of being an autodidact all for FREE. This is one time, BYU, that you are defnitely rocking my socks.
Although I’ve been a little disappointed by some of the homework assignments (yeah, I know that’s super weird), I have overall loved being able to learn new knowledge and build on existing knowledge while I’m at work, and the short course I took on Self-Discipline still has me pondering. I’m currently in the middle of the course on American Politics and am finding that I’m not disliking it as much as I thought I would (I will get over my dislike of politics yet). I like how many of the classes hit regular issues that concern all citizens (like finance and government) and apply gospel principles while teaching the fundamentals.
Overall, it was a happy online find, and I’m so glad I looked into it–now I can utilize all the time I was dawdling away before looking at pinterest and facebook….although those are okay in small doses too 🙂
Intermediate swimming, let’s see what you will teach me…