Moving on up at school

Photo illustration by Ron Medvescek / Staff As students advance into middle, high school and college, their skills and maturity levels must rise as well to cope with new challenges. Photo illustration by Ron Medvescek / Staff Laura Hernandez, left, Michelle Vock and Rachel Washburn have experience and advice on moving into new levels of education.

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Students face challenges with each new level

Morning will soon break on the first day of school, sunlight falling on thousands of serene, summer-rested faces.

The universal mixture of anticipation and dread churns deepest in the scholars moving up to bigger and better things: to middle school, high school or college.

"I would say the biggest challenge for many kids is actually sixth grade, as far as going from having one teacher to having to have many teachers," said David Bynes, founder of the Academic and Behavioral Center, 1735 E. Fort Lowell Road.

"That creates all kinds of organizational challenges for kids and sometimes even behavioral challenges, because the expectations are different in different settings depending on who the teacher is."

For Michelle Vock, 12, who survived sixth grade at St. Cyril's School by staying organized, the transition was less intimidating because she didn't have to change schools.

"I think it was more challenging in sixth grade because we had more homework," she said. "In fifth grade, we might have had an hour of homework each night. It might have gone from an hour to an hour and a half."

The challenges in high school are more social than organizational, Bynes said.

"In high school, there's more free time, more unstructured time, and a lot of kids have difficulty with the self-discipline that's required," he said, noting that ninth-graders are more likely than upperclassmen to skip school and receive behavioral referrals.

For Hannah Partlow, 15, moving from middle school, where she recognized all the faces, to Flowing Wells High School, where she didn't know many people, had its advantages.

"There's a lot more people," said Partlow, a sophomore. "You're not stuck with the people you've been with since, like, middle school."

Caitlin Burns, 15, found out that high school is not as scary as incoming freshmen think.

"People don't, like, stuff each other in trash cans or whatever," the Flowing Wells High School sophomore said.

Nor are students constantly subjected to peer pressure.

"When people have an opinion about something, it's respected that they actually do have an opinion," said Laura Hernandez, 14, a sophomore at University High School.

Students shouldn't expect their high school teachers to coax them into studying like their teachers in middle school did, Burns said. If students miss class, teachers won't go out of their way to tell them what the homework assignments were. In that way, students become more self-reliant in preparation for college, something Judy Bowers said is necessary to succeed at that level.

"I think probably one of the hardest challenges (for college students) is their schedule, because they're really on their own and their classes don't meet every day, so they have to allow time in their schedule for studying and for getting their work done," said Bowers, guidance coordinator for Tucson Unified School District.

"Usually at college, they don't give you weekly assignments; they give you quarterly assignments, so planning ahead to get that work done on time is always hard."

Kyle Mann, 19, a sophomore at Northern Arizona University, enjoyed having more academic freedom.

"Everything had to be too structured in high school," he said, "like papers had to be written a certain way and projects had to be done in the same order every time. In college, I was able to experiment with different ways of writing."

College was not nearly as difficult or frustrating as Mann had expected.

"I got into the flow pretty easily, especially from the first day," said Mann, who graduated from Catalina Foothills High School, "because you do realize it is a lot like high school."

Mann said the hardest transition he made was from middle school to high school.

"When you're in middle school, your parents are on your case all the time, and so are teachers," Mann said, "and you really can't go too wrong in any way because you're not really in a whole lot of control. By the end of high school, you should pretty much be on your own, be pretty independent."

By following the suggestions of students and experts (see below), parents and students can make moving on to the next stage of life as smooth as possible.

Sixth and ninth grade

* Geoffrey Moyer, 12, a seventh-grader at Basis School:

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