Transitioning to high school can be a bit intimidating, especially when you haven’t a clue as to how hard the classes you’ll be required to take might be. As seniors, we have been put through the wringer and have suffered through all the classes so we might as well put that suffering to use and identify the most challenging classes for each grade level.

In ninth grade, the hardest class for many individuals was Spanish Native. While most of us do speak Spanish, we tend to speak Spanish typically used in North America, not the Spanish spoken in places like Argentina, otherwise known as Castellano. A lot of the words were new and some of us tended to struggle with keeping up with the accent as it was all foreign to us. The way non-native and native Spanish were balanced out was not the best because non-native Spanish could prove to be too easy for a lot of students but Spanish native would be too difficult because many did understand the language but could not write or read it very well. when we would take tests or have writing prompts, a lot of students would fail them or barely pass because they could not write in Spanish.

Unfortunately, Covid-19 hit during sophomore year in high school and the classes we took were experienced through a zoom meeting. This means that we had an entirely different experience but it seems as if the hardest classes remain the same. Chemistry is the top contender when it comes to the hardest class during sophomore year, especially if you took this class during quarantine. Chemistry requires you to be there for every class because we would practice problems from the previous lesson. A lot of the problems you needed to solve in this class would require you to use shortcuts on the computer which was not difficult but if you have no computer then you were unable to use those features meaning you could not solve the problems most of the time. We would learn new equations that both dealt with numbers and letters as well as learn the periodic table. Having to add the equations was difficult because you would have to identify the elements and look at the periodic table to be able to know what element you were left with.

Junior year is arguably one of the years that most stands out in high school as it is the year colleges tend to focus on. The steady stream of endless questions just adds to the stress of classes. Those who were troopers and added AP classes to their schedules, agreed that AP U.S. History was one of the hardest classes for them. If AP U.S. History was removed from the equation though, as not everyone took it, the class that would take the cake for being the hardest is Physics. Physics requires you to understand certain concepts and then apply them to problems, not to mention the equations you have to remember to solve the problems. The Physics teacher, Mr. Rivera, is amazing, though, and he has neat little tricks to help make physics easier for students. Unfortunately, that does not mean that the retention rates are very high and that we didn’t struggle for exit tickets at times.

As for senior year, it may be our final year but that doesn’t stop our classes from making us rethink all of our life choices. Outside of AP-level classes, classes tend to be typically easy. As long as you keep up with your assignments, then you’ll be set for the year. For those considering taking AP classes senior year, both AP Literature and AP Biology have proven to be the most demanding classes. Both these classes require you to not miss a day as there’s a high chance that you’ll miss meaningful material in that one day and will have to catch up while simultaneously learning new material that is vital. For AP Literature specifically, you will be reading the classics and sometimes may struggle to make out the meaning of things within the works at first. It requires a lot of patience and perseverance.

Everyone has different experiences when it comes to the classes at Neuwirth, so it’s very possible that any of the ones we listed didn’t make someone else’s personal list of the hardest classes. Everyone has different skill sets but these just happened to be the ones that we complained consistently about with our peers each year of high school.