What 9th Grade Students Should Do to Start the Year off Strong
Elton Lin
For many students, ninth grade is a big deal. They’re high schoolers now, and with high school comes new social spheres, larger class sizes, a more intimidating workload, extracurricular options—the list goes on. If all this isn’t enough, ninth graders should also take the new academic year as their cue to start planning for college. Don’t worry: ninth graders shouldn’t be stressing about standardized testing just yet, nor the actual application process. Instead, ninth graders’ first steps in their four-year plan should revolve around exploring their interests. Which class subjects capture their attention? Which club or extracurricular gets them excited? Figuring out these interests will be essential in guiding your ninth grade student through their college-focused high school career.
High School Curriculum and Online Courses
For ninth graders, the high school curriculum can be a daunting change of pace, from more difficult workload expectations to harder material to perhaps even AP/IB classes, depending on the school. However, high school classes for ninth graders are less of a course selection and more of a course requirement. Ninth graders may find themselves limited to mandated courses, and although this curriculum is still very important for testing your interest in a good variety of academic fields, these limited courses don’t give you much leeway to branch out and explore subjects beyond your English class or your level of math.
So how can a ninth grader easily broaden their academic horizon beyond the classroom? The answer: online classes. Schools may be largely transitioning back to in-person learning, but the value of extra online courses lies beyond pandemic safety. Online courses have long been valuable resources for students looking to branch out or pursue subjects they couldn’t otherwise take normally at school, and with a greater flexibility to student schedules, from scheduled meeting options to asynchronous learning. Some long-standing, well-qualified programs include UC Scout, BYU Online, and Coursera, and they offer online courses throughout the academic year—and even better, UC Scout and BYU Online allow students to earn additional course credit!
What kind of subjects should ninth graders take online, then? Think about class subjects you haven’t studied in junior high or your first month or two of high school, subjects that have intrigued you but haven’t been accessible in a daily classroom setting just yet. Maybe there’s a foreign language that you think would be cool to learn—no matter how niche the language, chances are there’s an online course for that. Maybe you want to see what it’s like to study a more specialized discipline, such as graphic design, psychology, or law. For situations like this, the internet is your friend.
Clubs and Activities
Of course, exploration for ninth graders shouldn’t be confined to the classroom. Students should turn their eyes to exploring different clubs and activities as well, and now that they’ve entered high school, a wealth of interesting extracurriculars are newly accessible to them, spanning broad and niche interests alike.
Most high schools, both public and private, host club chapters of nationwide student organizations, such as DECA (business and marketing), Interact Club (volunteering and community service), and the National Science Bowl (STEM competition), just to name a few. However, smaller-scale clubs can be just as valuable to you and your ninth grade experience. Look at the clubs your school offers—maybe there’s a culture club, a robotics club, a slam poetry club that hosts open mic nights once a month. There are also clubs that offer workshops or events that are open to non-club members, allowing you to dabble in their activity before deciding to actually commit to investing time in club membership.
Clubs aren’t the only way to expand your extracurricular horizons, either. Ninth graders should feel free to look outside of school as well, from joining actual programs to pursuing personal hobbies at home. Learn to code, pick up an instrument, write a blog, experiment with art and graphic design—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
As we mentioned before, ninth graders should not be worrying too much about standardized tests, insofar as literally taking practice SAT and ACT exams. However, we do recommend that ninth graders start building up experience in SAT and ACT-relevant material, though not necessarily officially linked to the tests themselves. For example, ninth graders should 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 for the actual SAT and ACT tests by the time they become eleventh graders.
When it comes to the math portion of these exams, which cover up to Algebra 2 content, high school students will largely be eased into the relevant material by the time they reach tenth or eleventh grade. While some students may benefit from some extra practice and preparation, we don’t recommend that ninth graders spend their free time at this moment preparing for SAT/ACT Algebra 2 beyond what’s necessary for the classroom; this year, the exploration process is much more important for their college prep and personal development.
Evaluate, Evaluate, Evaluate
This brings us to the pivotal point of this ninth grade exploration process: student feedback. Running around and exploring all of these different interests and subjects is all well and good, but now you need to pause and evaluate your thoughts on this vault of experiences. Which activities in particular had you excited for more? At the core of it, why did you like these activities? Which activities instead had you internally dreading the thought of attending another meeting, and why did they fail to crucially keep your interest?
Sometimes, certain activities just don’t resonate with you, and that’s perfectly fair. However, when you’re undergoing this self-evaluation process, try to get at the heart of the matter. 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, too, should participate in student feedback by taking their students’ conclusions 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 support them as they 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.