Is Taking All Honors Classes Freshman Year a Bad Idea? What Parents Need to Know
Last August, I found my 14-year-old daughter Lila hunched over our kitchen table, crumbs from a strawberry Pop-Tart sticking to her printed course selection sheet. She’d checked the honors box next to every single core class: biology, algebra, world history, English. Four honors classes for her first semester of high school, on top of four hours of ballet a week and a monthly volunteer shift at the local animal shelter.
“Why all four?” I asked, pushing my cold mug of coffee out of the way to lean in. She shrugged, scrolling through her class Instagram group chat where everyone was posting their own all-honors schedules. “All my friends are doing it. Colleges won’t look at me if I don’t challenge myself, right?”
Three days before that, a mom had sat across from me in my part-time high school counseling office, twisting her wedding ring while she talked about her own freshman son. He’d done the same thing: checked every honors box, wanted to keep his cross-country training, and by week three, he was falling asleep in first period and skipping pasta dinners with the family to cram for chemistry quizzes. She asked me the same question every parent asks that time of year: was taking all honors freshman year a bad call?
It’s not a yes or no answer, but I’ve seen enough kids walk this road to know the default of “more honors = better” hurts more freshmen than it helps.
Lila stuck with all four for the first three weeks. She’d leave the house at 7 a.m., get home at 6:30 from ballet, eat a granola bar at the kitchen counter, and do homework until 11:45 every night. At first she said it was fine, just an adjustment. Then one Tuesday I picked her up from ballet, and she got in the car, dropped her 30-pound backpack on the floor, and started sobbing. She’d left her honors history study guide on her desk, had to leave practice 20 minutes early to run home and get it, and now she was sure she’d fail her quiz and let her teacher down and never get into college.
I didn’t give her a pep talk. I just handed her a half-melted mint from my cupholder and drove to get ice cream. The next day after school, we sat down and went through each class one by one, with a simple rule: what do you actually care about right now? Lila wants to study marine biology someday, so bio honors was non-negotiable. She likes math and wants to take calculus by senior year, so algebra honors stayed. World history felt interesting enough, and she was keeping up even if it was a lot of reading. But honors English? She’d always hated timed writing, and the teacher was assigning a 3-page essay every two weeks on top of the reading. It was the thing sucking up all her extra time, the thing that made her miss movie nights and cut into her sleep.
We called her guidance counselor that afternoon, found out the school allows class changes the first four weeks without any mark on your transcript, and switched her to regular English the next Monday. That’s the concrete tip most parents miss: almost all high schools have a grace period for dropping an honors class if it’s too much. It’s not a failure to switch, it’s adjusting to your actual workload.
The exercise I always walk parents through is adding up the hours, plain and simple. Most honors classes assign 1 to 2 hours of out-of-class work a night, minimum. Four honors classes? That’s 4 to 8 hours of homework a night, on top of 7 hours of school. Add a 10-hour a week extracurricular (sports, ballet, robotics, whatever), and that’s 15 to 23 extra hours a week of work on top of school. That’s a part-time job for a 14-year-old who still needs 9 to 10 hours of sleep a night. Few kids can pull that off long-term without burning out.
That mom’s son I mentioned earlier? He was running 12 miles a week for cross country, had five honors classes, and we added it up once: he was working 26 extra hours a week on top of school. We ended up dropping honors Spanish, moved him to regular, and by second semester his overall GPA went up half a point, he got his running speed back, and he didn’t have to stay up till midnight every Sunday cramming for quizzes.
The myth I hear all the time is that a B in honors is always better than an A in regular. That’s partially true for upperclassmen applying to competitive colleges, but for freshmen? Colleges care way more about your cumulative GPA and the upward trend of your course load than they do about how many honors you took your first year of high school. You can always add more honors sophomore or junior year once you know how high school works. It’s much harder to fix burnout and a low GPA freshman year than it is to add challenge later.
Some kids really can handle all honors. I know a freshman who doesn’t do any after school activities, loves reading and problem solving, and got straight A’s in all six honors classes he took last year. It worked for him. The problem isn’t kids who can handle the load choosing to take it. The problem is kids who take all honors because they think they have to, because their friends are doing it, because their parents assume more is better, before they know what high school even feels like.
Last week, Lila came home with a B+ on her bio honors midterm. She studied for two nights, but still went to her best friend’s birthday party the Saturday before, no skipping out. She gets to bed by 10:30 most nights, still has time to walk the shelter dogs on weekends, and hasn’t cried in the car since that Tuesday back in September. It’s not a perfect system, and she still jokes sometimes that she’s “falling behind” the kids with full honors schedules. But for her, it works. I still don’t have a one-word answer for parents who ask if it’s a bad idea. I just tell them to add up the hours, ask what their kid actually cares about, and remember that it’s okay to leave some challenge on the table for later.
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