My children are in school full-time and the oldest is responsible enough to watch the younger for a few hours when I'm gone when they get home, so that does take one worry off of my mind. However, balancing classes with this full-time work schedule will mean a lot of late nights studying and writing papers.
A usually start my day before six, getting the kids ready for school and myself ready for work. Including my commute, I work about ten hours daily and return home around six pm.
Then I do my best to leave my work at the door and spend some time just being with my kids; hearing about their day, what they're learning in school, what the latest trends in their social circles are, and all of the details that I want to know about their lives. We cook and eat dinner together, but I'm afraid that that luxury is going to be cut short soon to allow me more study time. More evenings, the kids are going to be responsible for putting together a ready-made meal, or thawing a frozen entree, or making sandwiches, or (occasionally) ordering a pizza!
Once home from work and having heard about the days of my children, we'll have dinner together, even though I might have to spend less of dinner talking or cooking and more of it reading and proofreading. I won't sacrifice helping my kids with their own schoolwork when they need it for my own studies; however, they're getting to the ages where most parents aren't able to help conjugate verbs in the pluperfect past tense or extract whole numbers from complex calculus formulas anyway. I'll happily help with proofreading for grammar, for subject matter, and help them come up with creative ideas and methods of presentation, but my capacities in their math and science classes are definitely inferior to even their own.
Bedtime comes around 9 or 10, and for a few hours, I'll study alone and accomplish the bulk of my classwork during this time....
These work trips are also going to cut into my study time, since they're significantly busy-there's not a period of several hours, like a layover, where I could read a few chapters and write some notes.
These factors that make me different from a traditional student-that I have children of my own, that I'm going to be keeping my full-time job during school, and that I'm trying to balance all of this after having been out of school for almost twenty years-these things can be seen as obstacles to my college experience, and in many ways, they are. But I'm choosing to view them as challenges-things that are difficult but not impossible or impassable like obstacles, and from learning the material to seeing my children grow more and more self-sufficient, I feel that the journey that lies ahead which I am in college is one that will allow all of us to learn, in the academic, personal, and social spheres. Although I know that there will be days when this schedule makes me want to quit, I look forward to the challenge, the learning, the adaptation, and the eventual achievement of my goal-college graduation
