High school can be a difficult place to get along. People always say it’s the best years of your life but that is only true for some of the kids. Sometimes high school can be the worst years of your life. It seems like if you aren’t among the popular crowd, you don’t get noticed and the whole high school experience becomes nothing but drudgery. If your child feel like high school is not going the way that they hoped it would, here are a few tips to try and do something to make it a little more bearable for the remaining time that they have.
Join a Club or Two
It doesn’t matter if it’s the chess club or you’re waving around cheerleading pom poms; being in a club will give you opportunity to get to know people and make new friends. The best idea is actually to join a variety of clubs. If you are using the megaphones for cheerleading as well as designing them, this will help you to meet all kinds of different people from different walks of life as well as help you to see different perspectives of each club. It’s easy to look down on them; cheerleading pom poms seem air headed but chess clubbers seem nerdy. Make sure that you don’t turn up your nose at anyone, this will not help you to make friends. As a bonus, colleges look favorably upon applications that include many different clubs and extra curricular activities.
Choose the Right Friends
You’ve heard it before: you become who you hang out with. If you are hanging around with trouble makers then eventually you will start being the one causing the trouble. Even if by some miracle you manage to stay well behaved while hanging out with rebellious teenagers, you will still be guilty by association if anything happens. Kids don’t like to rat each other out, for the most part, which is a good thing, generally. But, this means that no one will say who was not involved either because that would obviously leave the guilty people exposed. When this happens, most schools take a ‘collective responsibility’ approach where everyone gets in trouble and a lot of this kind of trouble will stay on your record and give you a hard time when it comes to applying for colleges.
Make Relationships With Teachers
This does not have to be a teacher’s pet type of relationship. Having an open, approachable relationship with your teachers can really help you when it comes to getting assistance with your work, getting letters of recommendations and even when you generally need advice. Teachers are invested in seeing you make it, no matter how that happens. If you are falling behind or don’t understand something, then you’ll want to have established a good enough reputation with your teachers so that you can feel comfortable going to them for help. Keep in mind that teachers are the ones who give you your grades so you should feel inclined to be friendly and engaging and make them like you.
Focus on Your Grades
The social aspect of high school is quite important for preparing you for the real world. But, unless you are going to have a career in it or get a scholarship from it, cheerleading pom poms and back flips are not going to be very helpful when you are sitting interviews for jobs and work. And it definitely isn’t going to matter how many parties you were invited to and if you had someone to sit with during lunch. Those things make high school a much more enjoyable experience but the truly important part is your grades. You need to make sure that you focusing on your studies, doing your homework and being on time for class, missing as little as possible. This way, you can be fully prepared for tests and exams that will put you in the next level. All of these things will work in your benefit when it comes to looking at colleges and then later careers.
So, don’t just focus on your cheerleading pom poms tricks because you think those will make you popular. There’s a lot more to high school than that.