With the first day of high school always comes excitement. Every student has a fresh start, regardless of their performance in middle school. Though most students have been with their classmates since elementary school, high school is full of new opportunities both socially and academically.
One of the most coveted high school privileges is students’ ability to choose most of their own classes. While students do have to fulfill requirements in major subject areas such as English, Math, Social Studies, Science, Foreign Language, and Physical Education, there are a wide variety of classes for each subject that satisfy these requirements.
In addition, students are able to choose from a range of electives.
someone who is really in languages now has the ability to take more than one language and someone who is interested in science can now be taking three science classes and so on. Many freshman now enjoy a typical school day a lot more this year than last year because they are interested in their classes.
Freshmen Brett Goodman favored the freedom of being able to choose his own schedule as well and also favored the larger variety of extracurriculars: “In my opinion, the biggest changes in freedom between high school and middle school are the ability to choose our own classes and now being able to pick and choose from a vast amount of clubs and other types of after school activities that surround you with people that have the same interests as me”. Goodman went on by saying, “Doing a variety of activities that I like with people who enjoy these same activities make the overall experience of school much better. Regardless of whether I am facing problems and creating solutions or viewing the stock market with others who like to be aware of its changes, I am meeting new people in a way middle school did not provide”.
For Nicole Rosenzweig the new sense of independence the high school provides is a major improvement on what the middle school provided: “In my opinion, the high school allows us to be independent and figure things out for ourselves. In middle school, various aspects of our typical school day were appointed for us in comparison to now, where the situation is that the high school lets us experiment with new things and learn on our own”. The new found source of independence the high school provides the incoming freshmen class helps the kids think for themselves and find ways to solve problems that they encounter throughout the upcoming high school years on their own.
The academic standpoint isn’t the only way things differ for freshmen in the transitioning from middle school to high school. The new social aspect of high school provides new experiences to meet new people and make new friends. For the freshmen, there is no longer a similar lunch period between the whole class where students would sit with their friends and only their friends. Instead lunch periods are dissimilar between students and the outcome is eating lunch and spending more time with new people of the same age and sometimes other ages as well. Branching out to people is vital in high school according to many freshmen and starting it now will make it easier to befriend new people in the years to come.
Blind Brook High School is encouraging freshmen to find new independence and allowing them to branch out in numerous forms. It starts out with turning right, but has numerous paths which each freshmen will follow throughout their high school careers.