If you have ever been camping then you know the rule: leave the site better than you found it or in the same shape. Why can’t the same rule apply to students graduating high school?

The main focus is making sure students graduate on time and preparing them for college level curriculum, often making it tough to distinguish a line between the two goals. A question can be overlooked which can be pivotal to a student’s success in college and in the workforce: are students graduating feeling fulfilled?

Throughout four years of high school, students are forced to mature and reconstruct their lives to be ready for reality after high school. But depending on the individual’s experience, it can make make or break their transition into college.

Simon Sinek, an author and inspirational speaker, stresses this fact, because he has witnessed it first hand especially with the millennial generation in the workplace. Sinek states that millennials are wonderful, idealistic, hardworking smart kids who’ve just graduated school and are in their entry-level jobs. But he has noticed that this generation’s lacks an insight.

Sinek states, “It’s as if their standing at the foot of a mountain and they have this abstract concept called impact that they want to have on the world, which is the summit. What they don’t see is the mountain.”  

Though they are hard working, do they know what they are working towards?

Teachers can fix this by possibly making their curriculum more engaging, instead of attempting to clump a full year of requirements into one year. By focusing on certain curriculum that the students deem important and creating lessons that focus on that subject.

Robert L. Fried, author of The Passionate Teacher, states that schools load us up with things to do that help everybody avoid confronting issues about meaning and motivation and choice in our work.

By having students being apart of creating their learning, they might be willing to be more creative and thus make their learning and high school experience better. Also by getting involved this will give students confidence, which can help later in life especially when transitioning for college and the real world.    

 It should no longer just be the student’s responsibility to feel fulfilled in school, since everybody comes from different backgrounds and not everyone has a support system. Teachers must take the lead and start making sure their students graduate fulfilled and make sure they are mentally ready for the next step in their lives. The teachers that do, will make an everlasting impact.