Students I Respect

My students are usually a pretty mixed bag, in terms of demographics. A lot of them are returning to school after an extended absence, and since this quarter I am teaching a pre-requisite course for nursing majors, I have a whole lot more returning students. It's really interesting to note that as a whole, these students are some of the best I've ever had the privilege of teaching. They are motivated by life experiences to seek a better job and life for themselves and their families. They work hard--many of them are working a full-time job and going to school, and/or also being parents to kids ranging in age from 9 months to 17.

One of my students works a night job cleaning offices. She has a nine year old son at home, her husband works the day shift, and she attends classes during the daytime. I can't imagine how much sleep she gets each night, but I'm betting it's not much.

Another student just welcomed her husband home from Iraq after a year's deployment. She has been playing single mom to 4 kids (ages 2 to 9) while also working as a doula and childbirth instructor. She took off a week and a half to spend time with her husband and her family, and came back today, made up a lab she missed, handed in the lab work by the end of the day, and also handed in the homework from last week. She's going to have this week caught up by Friday and will be all set to take the midterm with everyone else on Monday. Wow.

Another student is the single mom of two kids, 6 and 11, and is currently unemployed. She's enrolled full-time in the nursing pre-requisites at my college, and she is also enrolled full-time at another college training to be a medical transcriptionist. Her plan is to work her way through the nursing program as a medical transcriptionist, supporting her family, until she's done and can be employed in nursing. AND, she is in the process of building her own house through Habitat For Humanity. Wow.

I worked through college part-time, and I took "more than full" courseloads for 2.5 years. I thought that was kind of impressive, but 12 years on I am thinking that I had it easy. I wasn't married, I wasn't fully supporting myself with my job, I had supportive parents, and I had no kids. Yeah, that was the easy way to do college. This path that a lot of my students are taking? I would classify that as the hard way. But they are MOTIVATED. And they are all going to make awesome nurses when they're done. I'm privileged to teach these folks.