I'm trying to write about a girl's first day of Junior year in high school but I was homeschooled myself. Could someone walk me through what it might be like for someone's first day of school, etc? I've tried to research a little online but it's been difficult to find information. For instance, registration, finding their classrooms, lockers, etc?
At my school there was a registration day like a month before school started, so at registration you would get all your books for your classes and find your locker and if you wanted to, you could figure out where your classes were to. So if you were smart you kind of already knew where everything was before the first day. So the day would probably start waiting for your bus really early in the morning, my school started at 7:15 am so I was waiting for my bus at 6:30 am, usually you get to school about 15 minutes before classes start so everyone would kind of just wait around and talk in the atrium, but most Juniors in high school already have their license so they might not take the bus if they have a car, but some juniors are younger like I was and so they had to take the bus or find a ride from their friends. Once class is about to start everyone just walks to their class and finds a seat, hopefully you know a couple people in the class so you're not just awkwardly sitting next to a bunch of people you don't know. Of course on the first day everyone's dressed super nice trying to impress everybody, which is funny because like two weeks later no one cares anymore and everyone's dressing like bums. The first day is always super easy because the teachers just give you a syllabus and goes through the expectations for the class and maybe give you a weekly schedule, and that's the same for every class so there's no home work or actual learning that happens pm the first day. Some teachers have a seating chart so you don't get to pick who you sit by but other teachers let you sit wherever you want. A lot of teachers will do some kind of ice breaker exercise where the students all introduce themselves to the class and say what they did over the summer or say something interesting about themselves or something like that. That's the most awkward part of the first day, the only real fun you have on the first day is lunch, when you figure out who's in you lunch hour and what table you're going to sit at and all that fun stuff. There's five minutes between each class which gives you time to go to your locker, maybe fill up your water bottle or go to the bathroom and then walk to your next class. The first day can be really good or really bad, it sort of depends on what teachers you get and who's in your classes with you. If the teachers are cool and the people are cool then you have good feeling for rest of the semester but if you get some bad teachers and boring classes and nobody really knows each other in the classes then it can be a boring semester or even bad if you really don't like the teachers. I don't know if that helped or not but that's what I remember about first days of high school.
(Psst...f the thread allows you to edit the title of your post, changing it to "High School First Day?" can help other writers searching for info later. ) @Potato 's experience is how it's supposed to go. If you have parents who don't have their shit together, the experience is quite different: My high school was twelve miles away, and there was no public transportation, which meant parents had to drive their kids to registration and orientation. My parents didn't do that, so each year on the first day of middle school and high school, I wasn't registered. That meant spending a good portion of the first day of school in the hectic front office of the school while a school secretary or student advisor or guidance counselor or assistant principal frantically checked the registration rolls for classes to squeeze you into. After the first year I didn't bother dressing up, because I knew I'd either be standing in line or sitting in a chair in the office while the other students were settling in and socializing. School started at 7:10A.M. (not on the hour, the :10), and if you were lucky, sometime between 10:30 and 11:30 you were finally in the system and had a hand written schedule of classes and someone had retrieved some of your textbooks from the bookroom, because by now you missed your first several classes, when books were handed out. By now, it's probably lunch time, but you don't have a locker yet because the person giving out locker assignments is at lunch. So, you have to take your books to the cafeteria with you, which spells loser, so if you have off-campus lunch, you go to McDonald's or Pizza Hut across the street from school and avoid the other kids. In high school I looked old enough to be a college student, so that was pretty easy. If you're on-campus, you try to find someone to hang out with who looks similarly geeky. After lunch, although you're in the system, you're not on your teachers' class lists, which your teacher wisely printed out before school started, so you spend a good portion of the rest of the day standing off to the side at your teachers' desks handing them the slip of paper signed by the person in the office that shows you're allowed to be there and getting added to attendance rolls. On a couple of occasions, teachers refused to add me, saying, "This class is full" so I had to go back and stand in line at the office again to get another class. Once, the assistant principal walked me back down to the classroom and insisted I be added because all the English classes were equally full. The other students, who couldn't hear what was being said, assumed I got in trouble on the first day of school, which on one hand meant people didn't mess with me, but on the other hand meant others avoided me. Being fast on my feet, I figured outhow to work that to my advantage. Freshman year, I spent the first two days of high school (minus lunch at McDonald's) in a crowded front office waiting to get classes. Our school was overcrowded, so the office had a hard time finding classes to squeeze extra students into, and the registration process was complicated by the fact that your parents had to sign off on your schedule, along with a bunch of other paperwork, before you were allowed to set foot in a classroom. The guidance counselor who was registering me quickly sized things up and said, "When I was in school I was really good at faking my mom's signature" and looked away while I signed my own schedule so I could finally start high school. There was a lot going on at home, I had a lot of adult responsibilities, and my friends were all older, so the social aspects of high school were the last thing on my mind, so I switched to continuation school, studied hard and graduated the January after I turned 16. So, my high school experience is probably more like your home schooling experience.
Honestly, this sounds like it could easily be a YA novel of some kind... I'm so sorry about your experience. That sucks I'm British so my experience isn't relevant in this thread. However, nobody could pronounce my name. Bane of my life. I didn't get my English name added onto my passport until I was 14, so before that point the school had me registered by my full Chinese name, except everyone knew me by my English name. So teachers on the first day of school would be super confused when they got to my name, always mispronouncing it, and then when I'd raise my hand or answer to my name, they'd be like, "Oh right that's you!" And then scribble my English name next to the registered name. I think up till I was around 16 or 17, I still honestly didn't know what name to write on my exam papers. I'd always write in both names (one of them in brackets - the current illustration of this being in brackets is unintended lol). Might I add, I've doomed my daughter to the same fate. Tangent over.
I'm so sorry you experienced that! Nobody likes being singled out, especially over their name, which is so much a part of their identity. Thank you for your comment. I'd been wondering how to work it into my WIP but didn't think it fit, and your comment somehow triggered an idea on how to do that. Hmmm...I was used to doing things on my own, so at the time I focused on "getting high school done" like a task on a to-do list. I processed it more as being irritated at being singled out if that makes any sense. There were more positives than negatives. It taught me to look deeper beneath the surface of people because people were misjudging me (some teachers assumed I was irresponsible for not being registered in advance, students assumed I was in trouble when they saw me come in with the assistant principal, etc.) It also taught me not to worry about what other people think and just get on with whatever it is I want to accomplish. I care about people, but not about what random strangers think of me, if that makes sense. Things like popularity weren't part of my world and still aren't, in my personal life. For the OP, looking at the three comments thus far, even though our experiences are all different, the common theme and common experience in high school is that for the most part, nobody wants to be singled out.
I also got used to doing my own thing. I would rather be by myself than try to fit in - that doesn't mean I didn't want to have friends, but I always felt more humiliated pushing myself on people who didn't want my company. My social skills were a little lacking when I was younger, coupled with being foreign, I spent most of my time reading or drawing in the library. Sat by myself, mostly. I stopped trying to sit next to anyone because any time there was a spare seat, I was told by the person sitting beside it that I can't sit there as they're saving it for a friend. Stopped bothering to look for a PE partner because every time they already had a friend they wanted to be with and I was always the third wheel the teacher shoved onto a reluctant pair. Since that always happened, I just started waiting till the end for the inevitable to happen. When I did find friends, I think I found it hard to connect because I didn't know all the same shows and songs as my friends - everything I knew was still in Cantonese and frankly no one was interested. Of course I also got made fun of for my English throughout my teenage years - even by kids who were otherwise my best friends. I call myself a native speaker now but that wasn't always the case. Kids are cruel, man. So yeah, not wanting to be singled out - definitely. I think it might be why I have a soft spot for this troublemaker in my class (work at a school now). I think he just finds school hard - not the school work, but just coping in school.
By your Junior year in high school you better already know where your classes are, and know where to find your locker. After Freshman year, aside from career counseling, you're pretty much on your own. There's nothing all that special about the first day back to school for a Sophomore, Junior, or Senior besides catching up with school chums.
Um...That depends entirely on the school and how class registration is set up. Also, a lot of high schools now are so overcrowded, more portable buildings are set up over the summer, along with portable lockers. So, no, at many schools students don't know where things are on the first day. My sister never did. ETA: I remember one of my classes being in what had been a large storage room in the auditorium, which was set up over the summer. Your premise also assumes the person went to the same high school for their entire high school career. For many kids, that's simply not the case. I lived in an area that had a lot of businesses with seasonal and year-long contract employment, so the student population at my middle school and high school changed on a regular basis. Friends came and went, and I didn't know anyone who was there the entire time.
I guess I went to a high school that had advanced to the point of putting numbers on buildings, doors, and lockers.
The old parts of the school were, of course, but both my middle school and high school had large sections that were reconfigured every summer to accommodate the growing student population, so things moved around drastically. The area population doubled in less than ten years due to a major business boom in the area's new industry, and our middle school and high school were the only ones serving three small towns. So as a result, we had things like office partitions separating temporary "classrooms" in the gym and auditorium, study hall "classrooms" that disappeared so the gym could be used the next period, portable buildings, classes in what had been large storage areas for the district...all kinds of crazy stuff. As I posted in another thread some time ago, there was one class that I could never find in the labyrinth of storage rooms on the far end of campus, and when I finally learned my way around, it was so far from my previous class I couldn't get to it on time (shades of Sue Heck on The Middle). So, I only ever actually attended the class once and somehow managed to get away with it. When I changed to continuation school, that wasn't even in a school building. It was in an office park, and they bussed us to the high school for science lab and art class.
Thank you so much for all the replies, everyone! They are so helpful Question...would it be feasible that a family member could register for the student, get all of their info, etc? It would take too long to explain exactly why...but basically my character moved to a new state just a couple days before school actually would start.
Yea, a family member can register the student and everything, the only thing the student needs to be there for is to get their picture taken for their ID. At registration they just give you your classes, books, hand book and ID. It's basically just a long line of parents and students waiting around to get their turn at everything. There's other stuff at registration too but it's just basic stuff, like you can buy locks, or gym clothes, and there's tables set up by teachers for certain extra-curriculars and what not as well.
First day of school in america, if it's your first time in that school can be super stressful, but if it's not your first time in that school, like if the character had been in the same school for Freshman, Sophmore, and now Junior year, it will be just kind of the same thing. You get to school before the bell, and usually walk around finding your friends, and compare schedules. At my school the first day of classes is when you get a printed sheet with your class schedule and your locker number. Then you walk to your class, and the school day is just reading syllabuses. Then at lunch if you have open campus you get to walk around outside and usually hang out with your friends some more.
