What To Expect When The Class Of 2030 Enters High School This Fall: A Teacher’s Perspective
Last week, I stood by the water fountain in our school gym during freshman orientation, clipboard in hand, when a lanky kid with a faded Minecraft hoodie tripped over a backpack strap and dropped his iPhone. The screen spiderwebbed right in front of us. He didn’t yell, didn’t cry, just crouched down, picked it up, and tapped his smart watch to text his mom. That’s when I remembered: this is the Class of 2030, and they’re starting high school this fall.
His mom jogged over a minute later, apologizing for the disruption, and pulled me aside when she saw my staff lanyard. “I know all the headlines say this class is behind,” she said, twisting her own watch band. “He did third and fourth grade half over Zoom. He’s never been to a real school dance. Is he actually ready for this?”
I get the question. I’ve been teaching high school for 12 years, and I’ve heard every version of it from parents over the past six months. What I don’t think people are talking about enough is what’s actually true about this group, beyond the test score gaps and the think pieces about screen time.
By the end of orientation day, I’d talked to close to 80 freshmen. Half kept one AirPod in even when they were talking to me. A third told me they’d rather eat lunch in the library than the crowded cafeteria their first week. When I asked who was already planning to try out for varsity sports or run for student council, only three hands went up. That’s different from 10 years ago, when half the room would have shot their hands up before I finished the question.
But later that afternoon, when I sat down with a small group to talk about summer reading, I heard things I’ve never heard from incoming freshmen. One girl told me she spends every Saturday making tie-dye hats for kids at the local children’s hospital, a project she started during lockdown when she couldn’t visit her little brother who was getting cancer treatment. A boy said he restocks the free little library outside his house every Wednesday, because he noticed a lot of the neighborhood kids didn’t have books to read when the public library was closed. When I asked what they were most worried about for high school, no one said bad grades or tough teachers. The most common answer was “that everyone will pretend to be something they’re not just to fit in.”
That’s the thing people miss. They grew up with most of their early school years disrupted. They missed the messy, awkward daily practice of figuring out people face to face: how to argue with a friend and make up, how to raise your hand when you don’t know the answer, how to stand in a line and make small talk with the kid next to you. That gap is real, but it’s not a gap in how smart they are. It’s a gap in low-stakes social practice.
I’ve already started adjusting my lesson plans for this fall, and I tell parents who ask that small, concrete adjustments go a lot further than big panic moves. Instead of pushing your kid to go to the big back-to-school cookout to “make friends,” offer to drop them off 15 minutes late and pick them up 15 minutes early, no questions asked. Let them leave when they’ve had enough, instead of making them stick it out just to get the social experience. If they say they’d rather eat lunch in the library than the cafeteria the first week, write them a pass or email the school to ask for one, don’t tell them they have to put themselves out there. That just makes them more likely to shut down.
Instead of asking “did you make any friends today?” when they get home, ask something low-stakes: “what’s the dumbest rule you’ve heard of so far?” or “who brought the best snack to your first class?” Big open questions feel like a job interview, and they’ll shut down. Small, silly questions get them talking without pressure.
For teachers, I’ve been telling my colleagues that we don’t need to cram an extra hour of review into the first month to catch them up. Build five minutes of unstructured check-in at the start of every class. Let them talk about whatever they want for those five minutes, no topic rules. That’s how they build that face-to-face practice, slowly, without pressure.
Milo, the kid who cracked his phone, stopped by my classroom yesterday after orientation to show me the coding project he’s working on for the robotics club. He was with another kid who also signed up for robotics, and they were arguing about how to fix a broken drone motor, laughing when one of them got the wiring wrong. He told me he still plans to eat lunch in the library most days his first week, and that he probably won’t go to homecoming. That’s fine with me, and it should be fine with all of us.
We don’t need this class to be the same as the classes that came before them. They’ve had a different start, and they have different priorities. They care more about spending time on things that matter to them than checking boxes for college apps or popularity. That’s not a flaw, that’s just what happens when you grow up learning that plans can change overnight, and only the people and projects you care about are worth your time.
Some days this fall will be messy. Some kids will struggle to adjust, some will need extra time to find their groove. That doesn’t mean they’re not ready. It just means we have to meet them where they are, instead of trying to force them into the mold we made for high school freshmen 20 years ago. I don’t know what this year will bring, or how things will end up for the Class of 2030. But so far, I like what I see.
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