Something we keep hearing more and more about are the alarming rates at which college students are dropping out. While financial burdens are the main cause, they aren’t the only ones. Many first-year students said they struggled with how unprepared they were for college and it took them at least a semester to catch up. So what can high schools—or more particularly, Freedom—do to better prepare their students for college? How can Freedom help its students to learn better? Sure, we have project-based learning that’s supposed to help prepare us for real-world situations, but those situations aren’t likely to occur until we are completely done with our education. I know that in the classes I have taken so far in high school it seems all we do is project, after project, after project, and about 90 percent of these are group projects. Yes, some of them are interesting and I’d definitely rather be doing a project than just researching something and writing a five page paper on it, but in college that is exactly what you do. Occasionally students are assigned projects but it’s more important to know how to properly write an essay. Almost everything you will do in college is on an individual basis. Sure, learning how to cooperate with others and working together is an important skill, but so is thinking for yourself. We’ve concentrated so much on relying on others to help us with our work that when we have a project assigned individually the task seems daunting and almost impossible. One perfect example of this are labs in a science class. The immediate thing I think of when getting a paper describing the lab is: “I hope that my lab partner knows how to do this.” I’m sure that if I took the time to read it and really try to comprehend it myself, I would. But we are taught to rely on the other person to get us through it. I’m not completely against project-based learning or working in groups; I would just like to know how someone decided that focusing completely on projects is so much more important than other ways of teaching. For that reason, I think that one way to improve students’ education in high school is to do more writing assignments and individual work. Additionally, I don’t understand honors classes versus regular classes. Honors classes are supposed to challenge you and are typically taken by honors students. I’m fairly sure that there are no honors classes in college, so why were they created for high school? Last year was my first year not taking an honors English class and I thought, “oh, it’s just going to be pretty much the same thing but the work will be a little easier and we’ll just be assigned less of it.” I was so wrong. The gap between my regular English 10 class and what all of my friends (in the honors class) were doing was huge. There was very little homework in my regular class and when there was, if you happened to not finish it then you could get some time in class to work on it or just turn it in late for a few, if any, points taken off. I’m sure this sounds like the perfect class for almost every student but what they don’t realize is how much that hurts them in the long run. In college you rarely get to turn work in late and get credit for it. Honors students and regular students will all be taking the same classes but now the regular students will have much more difficulty with the course because they weren’t being ‘challenged’ like the honors class was. I’m obviously not qualified to go changing the curriculum in Freedom, especially just based off of my opinions, but I do hope that the high school can continue to better prepare students for college. No one should have to struggle during their first semester of college just to play catch-up because they don’t realize how different college actually is. I think Freedom has done a good job so far with this and with the new senior seminar class being implemented next year, students will have an even better idea what to expect in college; but there of course are still things that can be improved on.