When I initially researched online schools I was amazed at how many famous historical figures had “attended” Penn Foster. One of their students was the former U.S. Senator from Missouri, Sen. Stuart Symington (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Symington). He graduated from Yale Law School and also obtained his basic electronics training at home from PF when it was known as ICS. He went on to become President of The Emerson Electric Company and later was appointed the first Secretary of The United States Air Force. Then, in 1953, he was elected to the U.S. senate where he served until 1976.
I mention all this because I found out that he had made an interesting statement about the school; “I learned more about earning a living at ICS than I did during my time at Yale Law School” (http://www.pennfoster.edu/newsletter/archive/july06/index.html). Now, I’ve never attended Yale, but I did take a program with Penn Foster (Freelance Writing) and I learned something more than the discipline I was studying; I learned how to find time to study.
The school had recommended that I spend at least five hours each week on my lessons. That sounded simple enough, but when you’re employed and have a family those five hours are hard to come by. However, I found there were study hours hiding in plain sight so I didn’t have to steal the time from my family. I learned that if you spend an hour on public transportation commuting to work, you’ll find two of them hiding on the train or bus: one in the morning and the other one on the ride home. How do you catch them? Put down your newspaper and open your study unit. I found another one early in the morning that hid in my kitchen. So, without disturbing anyone, I used to get up an hour earlier each day and sneak into my kitchen with my study unit in hand and snag that one, too. Then, of course, there were those two extra half hour TV sitcoms hiding in my living room in the evening. Their twenty minutes of commercials weren’t really improving my life at all.
So, in the end, I managed to find at least fifteen of those hidden hours every week and completed my program in only six months. The best part was that I really enjoyed those particular hours a lot more than had in the past. If you’ve found a few that I missed, by all means, share them with the rest of us.