Do you remember the kinds of students you had in 9th, and how are they the same and/or different in terms of their work habits, grades, motivation, etc? I guess what I’m asking is whether or not your child changes that much academically throughout HS. Thanks
My D developed incredible time management skills in 9th/10th grades. She honed her writing and critical thinking skills, and just matured a great deal overall. She took only one HS class her senior year, but also earned 22 credits at a local college through dual enrollment. She was a shy introvert, and still is, but learned to speak up and participate in class discussions.
We told her she could attend one of our state’s public colleges (which offers free tuition for top grades) or any other college she could earn enough merit aid to attend. She wanted to attend college was motivated to keep her grades up.
Better deadline management. Honestly, he can keep track of deadlines in his head far better than I can. He figured out sometime in 9th grade that when teachers like you, they cut you some slack. Before that, teachers were the enemy and it was not cool to be nice to them. I guess you would call that becoming more politically savvy.
My oldest took a zero on an English assignment in 9th grade because he didn’t want to write a poem. He ended up graduating in the top 2% of his class despite that little glitch. (Tanked the marking period.) Younger son really pulled it together when he was writing applications. He got the agenda and really was thoughtful about all the decisions he made in the whole process. I’d always thought of him as my slacker kid - and he still is in some respects - but he ended up with fine college results and graduated with good (though not perfect) grades four years later. He’s been doing interesting things in the year since he graduated and looks to be about ready to take off on a new adventure.
Mine still struggles a bit with procrastination and self-discipline, but he’s always been pretty responsible about getting work done (just not as well as it could be!) He didn’t really care that much about his grades, figuring that a B in a really hard class was just fine. That changed toward the end of junior year. He was also timid about taking risks when he started 9th grade, yet by 10th, was opting for AP classes. Always quiet, but speaks up more in class now. He’s matured as a student, but more as a person – I really like who he is – thoughtful, respectful, funny. Fun to watch.
My daughters did not change much as students during high school, but they were always motivated, hard working students. I was a bit worried about my son, who was less motivated. In the spring of his sophomore year I took him to an open house at a college which had the major he was interested in pursuing, and I noticed a change after that. He was still happy with high B’s when a little more effort would have resulted in an A, but he seemed more diligent. The biggest change came in college. Once he was studying what he wanted, his grades were higher in college than they had been in high school.
@mamabear1234 Several of my S friends’ parents have noted that they should have started the college search earlier. Those initial college visits are when everything the parent had been saying finally clicked. For some of the kids, they figured out a few schools were now reaches that could have been matches.
Academically she has been consistent. The difference has been how she presents herself, freshman year was all about being pretty. Hair, clothes, makeup – I think she equated it to being “grown-up.” Now she goes for feeling comfortable in her own skin and not trying to live up to others expectations of how she should look. It’s been wonderful to witness.
This reminds me of this: In DS’s high school senior year, a student did not want to complete his final project for a class AFTER he had been got into Harvard. (And he did not attend it either.) What a rebellious young man. This actually point out a problem at a public school: Quote a many teachers would ask the students to do many meaningless tasks.
BTW, taking a zero in any year at DS’s high school will not bode well in terms of the class rank. Actually, in the class after DS’s, it was rumored that who would be valedictorian had sort of decided before the students entered the high school. This is because of how the class rank is decided in that school district, more specifically, it was about AP and some honor classes are weighted more, in 5 types of core courses. But the freshmen are usually not allowed to take these core courses which are weighted more (e.g., the foreign language class.) But a student found a loophole of taking all non-higher-weighted classes in middle schools (Heard that it was only one middle school that would allow their students to do this and she was from that middle school.) Thus, from the freshman year, her core courses are always weighted more. Adding the factor that the ceilings of the classes are not that high (sound familiar? The SAT takers?), no other students could compete against her in this GPA game. (Hmm…come to think of this: In many years (about 30-40% of the years), the valedictorian was from that middle school, even though that middle school is not considered as the top one. Many students from that middle school might have taken advantage of this.)
One of mine was the same student from 7th grade on. The other really matured academically after freshman year of high school. Work ethic really kicked in, confidence increased, grades shot up, and quit making excuses. Big, big, noticeable difference.
It’s easy to see your kids mature at different rates in different areas when they are infants and toddlers. The difference between these two (just in academics) made me realize that the same thing is happening in adolescence. It also gave me hope for kid three, who seems to finally be beginning to really figure things out and take responsibility for academics as a freshman.
IB diploma student, has matured intellectually over 4 years as he is genuinely interested in his subjects and loves to talk about the ideas he encounters in his reading. Never cared much about the subject matter of his classes before his IB classes, he just did his work (well) to keep me off his back. Now I would describe him as a budding intellect.
I see a lot of boys in particular pulling it together between 9th and 11th grade. S was a good but not terribly ambitious student in 9th grade. Something happened at the end of 10th/early 11th grade: He suddenly decided that he cared about doing well and being perceived as a good student. He’s finishing up medical school now. If you had told me that’s where he’d be in 9th grade, I’d have laughed out loud. We are so grateful that we held him back a year in kindergarten, when we realized that his late birthday would have made him the youngest in his class going forward. It may not seem like its a big deal in 1st grade, but in high school, that extra year - the gift of time - is huge.
Given how tightly the kids were ranked together that zero probably cost him at least one or two places, he learned that writing a bad poem is a much better idea than no poem. He also lost a couple of places when the schedule he wanted to take caused scheduling conflicts that cause a couple of honors or AP classes to get replaced by less weighted versions. He was not interested in gaming the system and since one of his acceptances was Harvard, I think he made fine decisions. (Including the one not to go to Harvard, but a lower ranked school that was better in his major.)
My son in 9th grade: terrified of failure, battered from an awful middle school experience, refused to take a single honors class in spite of getting a 234 out of 240 on the SSAT (private school admission test)
10th grade: agreed to take a few honors classes; auditioned for (and won) the male lead in the upper school play, much to his parents’ shock
11th grade: took a few AP classes and aced them; began to set own alarm clock (!); continued to be passionate about theatre; was 3 points away from NMF on the PSAT
12th grade: took all AP and honors classes by choice; won several awards at the end of the year
first semester in college: decided to take a full year of Japanese, despite hating Spanish in high school and dropping it his senior year
When I review this list, I see that his growth has been in the areas of self-confidence, risk-taking, and personal discipline, all good things! So yes, kids certainly do change throughout high school!
I hate to sound negative, but both our sons have just gotten more burnt out on school. S16 tested very well and had a good enough GPA to get a fair amount of scholarship money. I will say that he’s done better senior year. S18 was in a very competitive program and decided to drop out of it after this semester ended. It was just causing too much anxiety. He’s getting help and, like his brother, is very talented. Like me, he just never liked school very much.
First kid was shy but this got a lot better after a year or two in high school especially with involvement in EC. Second one, now that she is finally challenged, is wrestling with “good enough”, which is difficult for the perfectionist.
Most of our children have remained pretty consistent academically and blossomed in adulthood. Their paths as adults have not been surprising, but more of a fulfillment of who they are.
Our Aspie, unfortunately, has struggled with adulthood. His deficits became more and more debilitating during high school and now as an adult, he needs a lot of support. Academically, he was strong student (he has a high IQ and learns very quickly) but his anxiety, rigidity, and executive function deficits dominated his life as a college student. (The indications were there in10th grade, but we had blinders on as to just how impacted he was bc his intelligence compensated for his deficits.) He has maintained a low-level full-time job for 2 yrs, but he relies on us to juggle all of the balls required in adulthood (paying bills, buying groceries, living in a budget, etc.)
My kids did not change academically in HS. D. did not change in college / medical school either. S. improved a lot in college. The difference between HS and college was that his college program did not have many general study classes, it was no time for them. He spent most of his time in college in art studio, and that was exactly what he wanted to do.
I am a little confused by the consistency of responses here. My kids did change, to different degrees, during high school, but apparently in a way that was different from everybody else’s kids.
Both kids were essentially effortless great students through 8th grade (in one case) or 9th grade (in the other, at a different school). The older one had a few minutes of rebelliousness in 4th grade – we arrived at a parent-teacher conference in mid-October to learn that our child had yet to hand in any assigned homework that year – but after working through that had happily skipped along as one of the top students in her class, with a school-wide reputation for the stories she wrote. High school was a big shock to her – more demanding classes, more competition, more precise sorting of good students. She wasn’t at all used to working hard at things she didn’t like (meaning math), but all of a sudden she had to do it, and she wasn’t at all used to not being at the top all the time, but she couldn’t avoid that, either. Over high school, she became somewhat more herself. She decided she was OK with being merely competent at math, doing the work to get B+s, but not more than that. She increasingly focused away from school for her “professional” training. She wanted to be a writer, and she was naturally very good at it, with the result that hardly any of her teachers actually tried to teach her anything about writing. So she took responsibility for working on her own, submitting stories to competitions, applying to workshops, founding a zine. She was always part of the top-student clique, but she developed friendships with kids who weren’t in that clique, kids who did art or music that she liked. (In part, that happened because she switched schools, and it took a few months for the new top-student clique to absorb her. But she was not really looking to be part of that clique, and even when she was clearly a full member she held herself aside a lot and continued to cultivate other sorts of relationships.)
Kid #2 really didn’t hit any academic speed bumps until 11th grade. No one who knew them both, including him, thought he was as skilled as his older sibling at academic things, but he consistently got better grades, because he cared about that – he never considered blowing off a class because he didn’t like it. His identity and status became very wrapped up in his GPA. So over time he got more and more tense. In the second half of high school, he had rock-star status at his school, but he was deathly afraid of being humiliated and losing everything if he couldn’t keep his grades up. At the same time, he, too, was developing more focus outside the classroom. He spent a lot of time on two school-based ECs – something he did very little of before 10th grade – and also on a paid job and a weekly volunteer gig, and tap lessons he had been taking in a desultory way for years.
I think what these posts show is that no matter where your kid is in 9th grade, a lot can happen between 9th and 12th grade - and the end of college. Which is why parental assumptions in 9th grade about which colleges are a good fit, which careers are best for a given kid, where a kid will probably end up in life, is just a hypothesis that needs testing. Even the kids that go from A to B to C as predicted can throw curve balls at you late in the game - and parenting means you just have to be ready to catch whatever comes. In fact, it never stops. When I think about my own family and the number of mid-course corrections that my siblings and I have made from high school onward, I realize that part of being human is to continue to evolve. It just happens faster in those high school years.