by Allyson Celestra
Well to start off, if you don’t know what a Technical High School is, I’ll explain. At my school, in 11th and 12th grade, half of our classes are technical courses. Like the technical course I want to take later on is nursing, but there are also things like drafting, medical assisting, cosmetology, culinary, and multimedia. I don’t really know about other technical high schools, but mine does not have sports. So, if we wanted to do sports we would have to do it through our “home school” which was the school we were originally zoned to go to before we chose to go to mine. Another thing at my school is that all sophomores are required to take their PSAT and most of them start dual enrollment in 11th and 12th grade then. I’m just a freshman, so it is pretty much like normal high school, minus the whole sports part. Also, in addition to not having sports, we don’t have Homecoming, but people at my school just went to Homecoming at other schools, so it isn’t such a big deal. I personally did not go to Homecoming; I planned to at first, but then I
So I’ll talk a bit about my classes here and how different they are from middle school. I take almost all honors classes; the only classes I have that aren’t honors are the ones that they don’t have honors for at my school. So here’s my schedule: first period I have English Honors, second period is Advanced Communications, third period is online Physical Education (don’t ask how), fourth period is Earth/Space Science Honors, fifth period is World Geography, sixth period is Spanish I, and then there is seventh period Geometry Honors. This is the first year my school has ran on a seven period a day schedule; before I started here, they ran on block scheduling. Block scheduling is where they only had four classes a day and had four classes one semester than four different classes the next semester. I feel like I personally would have liked that better, but in middle school I ran on a seven classes a day schedule, so it isn’t too big of a change this year. I find my classes pretty easy; my teachers are really nice and helpful. The only thing that really feels different to me is all the stairs. All freshman classes are on the third floor; so yeah, all those stairs. Plus, my Geometry class is on the second floor, while PE is on the first floor. But yeah, that is really nothing to complain about compared to all my friends at regular high schools.
The last thing I’ll talk about is lunch and clubs. At my school, almost every club meets during lunch, so naturally I barely had any time to spend with my friends at lunch. I have Green Club meetings on Mondays, which I actually find fun; we get to clean beaches and canals while we get volunteer hours for doing it. Tuesdays or Wednesdays, it changes every week; I help run the school store, which is sort of fun, but most of the time it’s just sitting there and eating while there are a few customers. Thursdays I have Photography Club, where we get tasks to do each week then post them to this thing called Edmodo. Then on Fridays, I have PBS Club meetings, which are just short little meetings in which the teacher in charge of it just tells us the schedule for when we’re supposed to work the school store. Also, on the either Tuesday or Wednesday I get to spend sitting with my friends, we eat outside and I like that freedom of not having to eat in the cafeteria.
So yeah. Overall, high school doesn’t seem as exciting as I expected it to be, but it still is fun and I love my teachers. At my school, I had to make almost all new friends, which was nice and I still keep in touch with some of my friends that go to other high schools. It still is a nice new experience and I can’t wait for what is to come. I think the next 4 years will be fun and different. Yay, class of 2016! \o/