What To Expect When The Class Of 2030 Enters High School This Fall: A Teacher’s Observations
Last Tuesday, I stood by the gym entrance during 9th grade orientation, holding a stack of crumpled schedule printouts and wiping sweat off my neck from the August heat. A mom in a stained Target shopping tote pulled me aside, her voice dropping like she was sharing a secret. “He did entire 6th grade on Zoom,” she said, nodding at her son 10 feet away, who leaned against the wall alternating between twisting a glow-in-the-dark pop it and scrolling TikTok. “Is he actually going to be okay here?”
I’ve been teaching 9th grade for 18 years, and this is the first year I’ve gotten that exact question from more than half the parents I talked to that day. The Class of 2030 hit most core milestones during the COVID years: most started kindergarten just before shutdowns, and spent their entire early elementary school switching between hybrid, remote, and in-person learning. By the time they got to middle school, many had gotten used to pausing when overwhelmed, muting when they didn’t want to participate, and stepping away from interaction when it got too much. That’s left a lot of parents and even some teachers wondering what we’ll get when they walk into high school this fall.
After orientation, I ran my pre-first-day icebreaker, where kids write one thing they’re excited about and one thing that worries them on an index card, no names required. I was expecting the usual “I’m nervous about homework” and “I hope I make the soccer team.” What I got instead was a lot of lines I haven’t seen in 18 years: “I don’t know how to ask for help when the teacher is right in front of me instead of on the other side of a chat box.” “I forget how to walk from class to class with that many people around.” “What if I forget what to say when someone talks to me out loud?”
But I also saw a lot of things that surprised me, that people don’t talk about as much. When we did the locker practice drill on Wednesday, one 14-year-old couldn’t get his lock open no matter how many times he tried, and he was starting to blush. Before I could walk over, three other kids stopped mid-conversation and crowded around. One pulled out his phone, pulled up a 15-second YouTube short on how to unjam a standard combination lock, and they talked him through it step by step. That’s not something I saw 10 years ago, when most kids would have just walked away or teased him for being slow. These kids are used to solving problems together with the tools they have, and that’s a strength no one talks about enough.
I’m a parent too—my oldest started 9th grade 8 years ago, so I get the worry. But the biggest mistake I see parents and even new teachers making is assuming these kids are “behind” just because their experience is different from ours. A mom emailed me last week panicking because her son never learned to write a full paragraph by hand, he does all his work on a laptop. I told her I don’t care if he takes notes on his laptop—most of these kids type 20 words a minute faster than I can write, and they can organize their notes with color coding and links faster than any kid I ever had with a three-ring binder. It’s a different skill, not a worse one.
What I tell parents who ask me what they can do to help right now is small, specific things, not big vague stuff. Instead of asking “are you nervous about starting high school?” which almost always gets a one-word answer, offer to drive by the school after dinner one night and walk around the outside with them to find each of their classes. If they say they’re worried about forgetting their locker combination, practice opening it three times a night for a week before school starts—that’s 10 minutes total, no big deal. If your kid says they don’t know how to ask a teacher for help, practice the line with them at home: “I didn’t understand that last part, can you explain it again?” It sounds silly, but for a kid who’s only ever asked for help by typing a message, practicing that sentence out loud takes a lot of the anxiety out of it.
For teachers, I’ve started doing a tiny thing that’s made a big difference in my class: every day, I put three color options on the corner of my whiteboard for the first month—green for “I’m good to participate today”, yellow for “I’d rather pass on speaking today”, red for “I need 5 minutes to step out and reset”. Kids just hold up a finger to show where they’re at, no discussion needed. I’ve had way more kids tell me that just having that option means they don’t spend the whole class stressing about being called on. I also keep my daily schedule posted on my whiteboard and my Google Classroom for the first full month—no exceptions, even after most kids have memorized it. Small adjustments go a long way.
Yesterday after school, I walked past the front steps and saw a group of my new 9th graders sitting there. No one was yelling over each other or passing around a bag of chips like kids did when I was in high school. They were passing a phone around, each taking a turn listening to a snippet of a new song, nodding and commenting when it was their turn. It’s different from what I’m used to. But it’s not bad. I don’t know how this year is going to go. There will be days when kids are overwhelmed, there will be days I have to adjust my lessons to meet them where they are, there will probably be a week straight where half the class forgets their locker combinations. But right now, standing there watching them, I don’t feel worried. We just don’t have to expect them to be the same as the classes that came before them.
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