What 9th Grade Students Should Do to Get Off to a Good Start

Many ninth grade students are already a few months into their high school career. Now that students have had time to feel out the differences that a high school environment brings—maybe they’re probing different social spheres, or navigating the larger class sizes and workload—it’s time to look forward and consider the first steps in your student’s college-focused four year plan. Don’t stress as much about testing just yet (especially considering the de-emphasis on standardized testing in the midst of the pandemic). Instead, for ninth graders, these first steps all revolve around exploring interests and figuring out which of these interests will guide their collegebound path in the following years of their high school career.

High School Curriculum and Online Courses

As a ninth grader, chances are your choices of courses are more limited to required classes, not giving you much leeway to branch out and try subjects beyond your level of math or your world history class. While the required high school curriculum is still very important for testing your interest in a good variety of academic fields, it’s worth your while to explore beyond the classes your high school offers as well. 

You’ve taken similar subjects in junior high and your first month or two in high school, but is there a subject you haven’t taken in your daily classroom setting that you’d like to try, that you’ve shown even a passing interest in? Is there a foreign language that you think would be cool to learn? Maybe you want to know what it would be like to study digital art, psychology, or sociology, but you can’t take them at school quite yet? Maybe your school doesn’t offer such specific courses, either. 

For situations like this, the internet is your friend. Even before the current pandemic, online courses have been valuable resources for students looking to branch out or pursue subjects they couldn’t otherwise take normally at school. UC Scout, BYU Online, and Coursera are just a few of the many well-qualified programs that offer online courses throughout the academic year—with UC Scout and BYU online being good options for students to get additional course credit. They’re often flexible and can adjust to each student’s individual schedules, with options from scheduled meetings to asynchronous online learning.

Clubs and Activities

Remember, exploring various activities should be your focus as a ninth grader. This way, you’ll accumulate a wealth of information and experience that you can then use to decide what you want to focus on going into tenth grade next year. Now that you’ve entered high school, a new door to extracurriculars has opened up to you, and with that comes a great variety of broad and niche interests alike that you can explore.

There are many nationwide organizations with club chapters in most high schools, such as Interact Club for volunteering and DECA for business and marketing, to name a few; but the clubs and activities you join don’t have to be so large scale or widely-recognized to be valuable to you and your ninth grade experience. Maybe your school has a robotics club, or a culture club, or a club that meets once a week to cook together and learn recipes over Zoom. Maybe there are clubs that offer workshops or events that are open to anyone, even if they’re not in the club itself, allowing you to dabble in the activity first before investing more time and actually joining the club.

As for other extracurriculars, both joining actual programs outside of school and pursuing your hobbies at home are good venues for exploring your interests. Pick up an instrument, write a blog about a topic that’s always on your mind, or try your hand at some at-home engineering projects. Wherever your extracurricular search takes you, you’ll be discovering more about the opportunities available to you, as well as more about yourself, the activities that captivate you, and the activities that don’t.

Standardized Testing

A ninth grader should not be worrying about practicing standardized tests at this point when it comes to literally working on an SAT or ACT test. We do recommend, however, that ninth graders start a strong and consistent reading schedule in order to slowly improve their reading comprehension skills. The literature the school requires you to read isn’t enough, and frankly, can sometimes be too easy for students, so we recommend setting a consistent schedule with a variety of literature (fiction, nonfiction, magazines, scientific journals, etc.). This could mean you read 20 pages of a book each day or will always start the day reading 3 articles from a newspaper. Reading comprehension is a difficult skill to acquire quickly or cram for, which is why we recommend that ninth graders slowly practice and build up the habit so that they are ready by 11th grade. 

Regarding the math section of these exams, SAT and ACT math questions cover up to Algebra 2. Most high schoolers will get to Algebra 2 by the time they are in tenth or eleventh grade, so the material required for these tests will be at least introduced by the school. Extra practice and preparation may be necessary for some students then, but we don’t recommend ninth graders spend extra time prepping for Algebra 2 now when the exploration process is much more important. 

Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate

This brings us to the pivotal point of this ninth grade exploration process: student feedback. You’re running around exploring all of these different interests and subjects, but now you need to pause and think. Out of your growing repertoire of experiences, which ones in particular had you excited for more? Why did you like these activities? Which ones had you internally groaning or wincing at the thought of attending another meeting, and why did they fail to keep your interest? 

Try to get at the heart of the matter when you self-evaluate—instead of concluding, “I think programming just isn’t for me,” think about exactly why you feel that it isn’t suited for you. Is it because you prefer more physical, hands-on activities? Maybe you’re actually still interested in robotics, but you’d rather be brainstorming ideas for the robot or handling the electronics than writing out the code. Then, using that information, what are other activities that incorporate specific aspects that you did enjoy from your previous activities? These specifics are key pieces of information that will help you not only discover more about what exactly it is that you enjoy, but also how you operate and think as a person.

Parents should take student feedback seriously. If a student expresses hesitance in continuing a field of interest, take it as a signal to pivot away and pursue new things, rather than pressuring your student to keep doing something they’ve lost heart in doing. It’s okay for your student to change tracks often at this stage; the goal right now is to explore, after all. The best course of action is to encourage your student to follow their shifting interests, and to help them evaluate what they do and don’t like about each interest at every step!

As always, the advice we offer here mirrors the advice we give to our own students, but if you would like to see how we can customize advice for your student’s specific interests and needs, please feel free to request a free consultation.