Senior Year by: Kellen Pluntke

School is back in 10 days and for the first time since the third grade, I am genuinely excited. Last year was riddled with various complications that I was able to fight through thanks to the relationships that I was able to create with my friends and teachers. Now that I can walk into the first day of school with these great relationships already established, I can finally focus on my academics with a lot less stress than I had before. I’ve been waiting for the days to come when I can look back on my education and see all the progress I’ve made and feel pride and accomplishment, instead of resentment for the next years’ work that I know I will need to accomplish. I have finally reached that point. This next year I get to really work for my future. I cant wait to learn all the real life skills that I will need to take with me into whatever my next stage of life is.


This being said, I know there are many upcoming freshmen that are coming into high school that are likely very anxious about their future in high school. There are lots of things that I know now that I wish I knew walking into my first year. The most useful of these pieces of knowledge that I found way too late is how you set up appointments to meet with your councilor, and how to use your councilor to advise you for the future. I encourage any teacher of a freshman class to share with the students that they are able to go to their councilor to discuss how their education is going, or to get advice on anything they need. I often found myself confused about picking classes for the next year with little to no information provided, and I would have been able to pick classes that are a good fit for me with much less stress if I knew that I could ask my councilor, those decisions wouldn’t have been so difficult.

Another tip that I didn’t know about until my junior year is that you can go to other teachers for help even if you don’t have them in class. My freshmen year, I had a hard time in one of my math classes so I decided to come in early one day to make sure I understood the content before I took the test later that day. I felt like I was really showing my initiative by doing this and was happy about my choice to come in until I walked down the hallway, and saw that her class was full of students asking the same kinds of questions I came to ask. I ended up just sitting in the room waiting for her to have a gap in teaching other kids so I could ask my questions, but the moment never came. This happened often until my junior year, when I decided I was just going to try and ask another math teacher for help.