Is It a Bad Idea to Take All Honors Classes Freshman Year? A Teacher’s Perspective
Last October, during parent-teacher conferences, I sat across from a mom and her 14-year-old daughter, Mia, at a scuffed folding table in my classroom. A half-eaten granola bar sat on the corner of the desk, and the clock above the whiteboard ticked loud enough that I could hear it over the chatter from the hallway outside. Mia’s hoodie was pulled up over her hair, and she kept staring at her scuffed white sneakers while her mom talked. “She got all honors recommendations from middle school,” her mom said, leaning in, voice quiet. “We were so proud. But now she’s up until 11 most nights crying over homework. Is this… is this supposed to be normal? Is taking all honors freshman year a bad idea?”
That question hit close to home. Two years earlier, I’d sat across from my own son, Luka, at our kitchen table at 10:30 on a Tuesday night, watching him crumple a chemistry quiz into a ball and throw it across the room. He’d signed up for all six honors classes that freshman year, just like Mia, because all his top-performing friends were doing it, and he thought he needed to stack his transcript early to get into the engineering program he wanted. He’d stopped mentioning his weekly rock climbing lessons, and I’d been too busy grading my own students’ essays to ask why he was always home early on Wednesdays. It took a panic attack before a midterm for us to talk about how overwhelmed he really was.
Most parents I talk to default to the same assumption: more honors = better. If your kid qualifies, you sign them up, right? No one wants to hold them back before they’ve even started high school. But what a lot of people don’t talk about is that freshman year is less about the classes you take and more about learning how to be a high school student. You’re adjusting to new teachers, new peers, new expectations around time management, new everything. Even the kid who aced every middle school test can struggle with that shift. When you load on all honors from day one, there’s no buffer for that transition.
I’ve kept casual track over the years of how kids who take all honors freshman year end up doing. About a third of them are fine. They’re the kids who naturally work quickly, love learning, don’t need a ton of downtime, and still leave enough time for friends or hobbies after homework. For them, taking all honors isn’t a bad idea at all. But about half end up burnt out by the end of first semester, and their grades drop across the board, not just in one hard class. The last third end up disliking school so much that they stick to easier classes all through high school after that, just to avoid repeating the stress.
The first concrete thing I tell parents now is to do a 10-minute weekly check-in the first month of school that doesn’t involve grades. Every Sunday night, ask just two questions: How much time did you spend on homework each night this week, on average? Do you still have time to do at least one thing every week that’s not for school? That’s it. If the answer to the first is more than two and a half hours a night (not counting midterm or final week, that’s normal crunch time) and the answer to the second is no, that’s a red flag. That’s not “learning to handle hard work” — that’s overloading a kid who’s still adjusting to a whole new system.
The second thing I tell parents is that dropping an honors class isn’t a failure, and it almost never hurts your kid’s college chances. Most public high schools let you switch levels within the first semester without any mark on your transcript. Colleges never see that you tried honors and switched to regular. They look at your overall transcript across four years, and they care a lot more about strong grades in a mix of classes that challenge you than low grades in a full load of honors you can’t handle. It’s way better to drop one class early than burn out and get poor grades across all of them, or avoid challenging classes later on because you hated the experience freshman year.
We talked through that with Mia and her mom. Mia had wanted to drop honors world history for weeks, but she was scared I’d think she wasn’t smart, and her mom would be disappointed. We pulled her schedule that week, switched her to the regular section. The regular history teacher does more project work, less 50 pages of nightly reading, and Mia ended up loving the class. She got her after-school art time back, and her grades in her other four honors classes went up a full letter each by the end of the semester. She even auditioned for the spring play and got a supporting role, something she would have never had time for if she’d stayed in all honors.
Luka dropped honors physics after first semester freshman year, too. He did regular physics that year, got his climbing back, and decided he wanted to take AP Physics junior year, once he’d figured out how to manage his high school workload. He got a 5 on the exam, and when he applied to colleges last fall, no one asked him why he wasn’t in honors physics freshman year. They just saw the 5 on his AP exam and the engineering summer program he did, and he got into his top choice.
Last week, I saw Mia in the hallway between classes. She was carrying her big canvas art portfolio, swinging it by her side, laughing with two other girls. She waved at me, and I waved back. She’s a sophomore now, taking three honors classes and one AP, and that works for her. There’s no one right answer to the original question, I think. Some kids can handle all honors freshman year, and that’s great. Some can’t, and that’s not a failure, either. The worst thing we can do is act like taking on too much too early is just “part of the process” when it’s sucking the joy out of school for a kid. Right now, Mia’s doing fine. Luka’s doing fine. The adjustment worked, but it took admitting that the first choice wasn’t the right one. That’s all.
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