How to Help Your Kid Pick the Right High School Courses: Practical Advice From a Mom and Teacher
Last Tuesday, I found my 10th grader slouched at our kitchen table, laptop open to the district course selection portal, a crumb-covered peanut butter granola bar pushed to the side, and our golden retriever nose-deep in his backpack looking for more snacks. He looked up at me, eyes tired, and said, “I need advice on courses. I have no idea what to pick.”
The portal deadline was that Friday. All week he’d been coming home with conflicting stories: his best friend was taking four AP classes. His guidance counselor checked his transcript and said he “should push himself more” than he did last year. His soccer coach mentioned varsity takes extra time, but didn’t explain what that meant for homework load. He was stuck between picking AP Biology to “look good for college” or keeping the spot for Studio Art, the class he’s been talking about nonstop since last spring.
As a high school English teacher, I get this question every course selection season from parents and kids alike. Everyone has an opinion, but most of it boils down to generic takes that don’t actually help anyone make a choice that fits their life. I didn’t jump in with a ready answer. Instead, I grabbed a piece of scratch paper from the junk drawer by the fridge, drew three columns, and pushed it across the table to him.
First column: “Non-negotiable time sucks this year.” I told him to list every single thing that takes more than an hour a week that he’s not willing to give up. No judgment, just write it all down. He started with varsity soccer: 10 hours a week, plus 30 minutes of driving to and from practice every day. Then he added 8 hours of sleep a night (he learned last year that if he stays up past 11, he falls asleep in first period), hanging out with friends every Saturday night, and the time he spends fixing his old dirt bike on Sunday afternoons. When he added it up, he realized that left him with roughly 2 hours of homework time a night during soccer season, not the 4 hours AP Bio was rumored to take. That was the first wake-up call he didn’t even know he needed.
Second column: “What do you do for fun that doesn’t involve a screen?” I told him to leave out video games because that’s the first thing that gets cut when homework piles up anyway. He wrote drawing (he doodles comic strips on all his notebook margins and draws birthday cards for every family member) and messing around with chemistry experiments in the garage—he makes his own soap and grows crystals, just for fun.
Third column: “What hard stuff don’t you mind doing?” This is where he sorted out what challenge actually feels like for him. He crossed out “memorizing 200 vocab terms for a unit test” immediately. He wrote “writing essays,” “mixing paint colors,” and “figuring out why my chemistry experiments don’t work.”
After he finished, I told him the story of when I was his age. I signed up for AP Calculus because my dad said it was the only way to get into a good engineering program, even though I hated math and already knew I wanted to be a teacher. I got a B in the class, studied for weeks for the AP exam and got a 2, and dropped my engineering plan after my first semester of college anyway. I wasted a whole year of electives I could have spent taking something I cared about, all to check a box that didn’t even matter for my future.
The thing I don’t get to say enough as a teacher is that challenge doesn’t mean taking the hardest labeled class just to impress someone. Challenge means pushing yourself in an area you actually care about. Building a full portfolio for Studio Art is way more challenging for a kid who loves drawing than cramming for AP Bio tests he doesn’t care about. And for what it’s worth, admissions officers don’t care as much about how many APs you have as they care that you got good grades in the classes you took, and that you pursued things that matter to you. I’ve seen too many kids burn out before senior year because they took one too many hard classes just for the transcript.
Two other small, concrete things came out of that conversation that I pass on to every parent I talk to. First, if you’re torn between two classes, ask a student who took it last year, not just the teacher or counselor. Teachers have to fill their rosters, and they’ll tell you it’s totally manageable. A kid will tell you straight if the teacher assigns 3 hours of homework every night. My son texted a senior on his soccer team who took AP Bio last year, and the kid said he skipped lunch every day just to get the homework done. That sealed the choice for him. Second, remember almost every high school lets you switch classes the first 3 to 4 weeks of the semester. It’s not a permanent decision that will ruin your entire future. If you get in there and it’s too much, or you hate it, you can change it.
He submitted his schedule yesterday. It’s one AP (English Language, which fits his “don’t mind writing” rule), Studio Art, regular-level Chemistry, and his required core classes. He still texted me after school yesterday saying he saw an Instagram post from a kid saying all the serious college-bound kids take three APs junior year, and he wondered if he messed up. I didn’t give him a big motivational speech about following your dreams. I just said that Instagram doesn’t know how much he likes drawing, or how sore he is after a two-hour practice, and we can switch it the first week of school if he hates it. It’s not a perfect, forever solution, and we won’t know for sure if it’s the right one until next fall. But it’s his schedule, built around his life, not what other people say he should do. That’s enough for now.
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