Here’s a huge collection of amazing high school hacks that will help make your time at school a lot easier. Some of these will help with your school work, some of them will help you socially, and some of them are just convenient tricks so please read through these life hacks for teens and don’t forget to try some of them out – they could change your life!
You’ll be the high school hero when you share some of these high school life hacks for teens with your friends.
The Best High School Hacks for Students in 2022
Here are some high school hacks that’ll make life a bit easier, or in some cases, will help you unlock amazing experiences that will stick with you for years to come. These are important years, and it helps to know what’s important and which areas you can take some shortcuts.
1. Visit Your New High School Ahead of Time
If you’re someone who feels a bit anxious when you think about heading to a new school, like if you’re heading into high school or university, or you moved to a new place, this lift hack can help make that a lot easier.
The fear of the unknown can lead to a lot of extra anxieties around something that’s already pretty stressful and scary (going to a new school) in the best of times.
Heading to the new school ahead of time, whether it’s for some type of event or open house or just to walk around a bit can help you feel more comfortable there once you’re a student, so that your first day of school isn’t in totally unfamiliar territory.
At least this way you’ll have been there before, looked around, and have a general idea of what to expect. It can get rid of a lot of the stress!
2. Life Hack for Students to Remember Pi
If you need a good high school hack to remember the digits of Pi, here’s one that’s really simple and straight forward, and all you need to do is remember a short sentence.
“May I have a small container of candies?”
If you can remember the above phrase, then you can remember the first 8 digits of Pi, and you could even build upon this by adding more and more words. Here’s how it works…
3.1415927
May (3) I (1) Have (4) a (1) small (5) container (9) of (2) candies (7)?
Do you see the pattern yet?
Take the amount of letters in each word in the phrase, and that’s the number of the corresponding digit in pie.
If your school wants you to remember to 3.14159265, for example, your phrase could be…
“May I have a small container of golden coins?”
3. High School Hacks: Get Involved in Activities
This is a bit more involved than most life hacks for students and high school hacks, but it’s honestly one of the best ways to have the best possible experience during your time at school.
Even if it’s a pretty straightforward tip/piece of advice, that doesn’t require any secret tricks or special knowledge like a lot of life hacks do, this can still have probably the single biggest impact on your over experience in high school, the people you meet, the friendships you forge, and the memorable experiences you have.
This is a life hack for students in high school because this is a time where you’ll start to expand your social circle and really dial-in on the activities and hobbies that you enjoy a lot. This is a good way to meet more people who like similar things.
If you talk to adults, a lot of their favorite memories from their high school years will be the extracurricular activities they chose to participate in, because it’s the first time in many students’ lives where they’re able to decide what to pursuit on their own without being signed-up for stuff by their parents. The high school hack here is to simply take advantage of the opportunities.
4. The iPhone Calculator High School Hack
Do you use the iPhone calculator at school? If so, there’s a really useful and simple hack that a lot of people don’t know about.
Next time you have it open and you need to erase just one digit that you mis-tapped without having to press AC and start over, simply swipe to to the side at the top of the calculator app. Swiping to the left/right will allow you to manipulate the numbers on the screen in a unique way that makes things a lot easier when you use this app a lot.
5. How to Unlock a Scientific Calculator on iPhone
Here’s another one. Turn your device to the sideways orientation, and this will unlock a lot of new features on the calculator, making it usable as a scientific calculator.
You can even ask Siri to enter the numbers and do the calculators for you, if you’re working in a notebook or on a computer with your phone next to you and you want to stay hands-free.
6. Find Answers to Most Homework Questions (Homework Life Hack!)
If you’re stuck on a question in a textbook and you aren’t able to ask your teacher for help before it’s due, or you’re just someone who likes to learn on your own and to figure things out, you can find answers to most questions in textbooks pretty easily online.
Before you go ahead and do this, just remember that this isn’t meant to be used as a way to cheat through your homework. Use this as a way to look up the answers after you’ve already taken a stab at them, and you’re stuck, and you want to know if you have the correct answer.
If you end up looking up your homework answers, make sure you take some additional time to understand why that’s the correct answer and why you got it wrong at first.
With that said, if you’re ready ot use these in a way that’s moral and helps you learn (which is the goal of school!), then you can check out a site called Chegg Study which features answers to thousands upon thousands of textbooks for a relatively low monthly fee.
Slader is another option with millions of answers to homework questions from textbooks. They have a lot of free answers, but you pay need to pay a small sum of money to access the complete solutions. It’s a small price to pay if it helps you figure out your homework and learn better.
Finally, another way to get answers for homework is to buy the teacher’s edition of whatever textbook you’re working from.
The teacher’s edition is the same version the teacher uses which has all of the answers in it. With this, you can basically correct your own quizzes and homework to make sure that you’re correctly understanding everything.
If you’re ever caught looking up answers like this in a dishonest way, you may want to skip your high school reunion if you’re afraid to make eye contact with your teacher! But use these tools for the purpose of learning, and you aren’t doing anything wrong.
7. Use Your Lock Screen on Your Phone
On the first day of class, take a photo of your schedule and then set that photo as your lock screen and you’ll always know where you need to be without any embarrassing trips to the office, asking them to print you out another copy of your schedule.
You can also use your lock screen to show your daily schedule, upcoming homework and projects in each class, upcoming tests and exams, and so on. You can either find an app with homepage widgets, or simply write these things down and then take screenshots or photos of them to set as your lock screen.
If you just like to have a nice background or a picture of somebody you care about, that’s awesome too.
Life Hacks for Students
Here are some student-specific life hacks that will make school life a lot easier for you.
8. Pick Some Electives You’ll Enjoy
Once you get to higher grades in school, you’ll have more choices for what classes or courses you’re taking. Take advantage of this.
You don’t have to stick to the courses that fit the exact mold of what you’re planning on taking in college or pursuing later in life. Not every class or credit you earn has to be a part of a bigger plan, it’s okay to take some stuff just because you enjoy it, so explore your high school electives and see if there’s anything a bit different that might give you something to look forward to during the school day.
9. Speak Up, Be Heard, Ask Questions
If you’re unsure about something in class and you’d like the teacher to clarify, speak up! Chances are that at least one or two other people in the class, if not more, are also confused but just aren’t speaking up.
It’s okay to be heard. If you’re a shy kid, and you don’t like to speak up in class, just remember that you have every right to answer a question and to get an answer, and if you don’t want to do that during class time then you can always ask to speak to your teacher for a moment after class, or send them an email.
10. Take Great Notes
If you’re going to be spending your time in class anyways, you might as well learn to take great notes so that they’re actually useful instead of a page full of scribbles.
Taking quality notes can make it so much easier to study, and you can share them with your friends, and everyone will get a lot of use out of them and you’ll literally be making your peer group smarter.
Here’s a good video that goes over some very useful tips for taking notes that are effective, useful, and look great:
There are a lot of different strategies and techniques for effective note taking, and the best thing is to pick and choose the ones that work the best for you and to create your own system. At the end of the day, it’s got to be something that’s going to be sustainable and that works for you.
11. Get a Job or Find a Way to Make Money
Learning how to make money as a teenager is a really useful skill to get at an earlier age. It’ll take some trial and error, but generally speaking, if you find something like mowing lawns or shoveling snow, you can make some decent money on the side and even turn it into a full-fledged landscaping business someday.
Earning a bit of money for yourself in high school can make the whole experience a lot smoother, especially if you come from a family that doesn’t have a lot of resources. This extra spending money you’ve earned can be used for fun experiences with your friends, and just to be able to go out and do stuff without having to stay home all the time because you don’t have any money to spend.
12. Speed Up Your Lectures
If you have to listen to lectures for a college course, you can open up the audio file in an audio editing program and speed up the play speed by 1.5x or 2x. Beyond 2x, it starts to get a bit harder to listen, especially if you’re taking notes, but even playing it at 1.75x and pausing every now and then to take notes will get you through a lot more quickly, and it’s a lot easier to maintain your focus and attention if you have a lecturer or a teacher who speaks slowly.
If you’re watching a video on YouTube, it’s even easier to speed it up, there’s literally an option for it in the playback menu.
You can do this with audio files, video files, and so on. You’ll need to learn the basics of editing software, but there are enough free versions available and it’s easy enough to do that you should really just learn how to do this – it’ll come in useful for the rest of your school career, especially with more remote learning.
The few minutes it takes to learn how to speed up audio and videos will pay for itself the very first lecture. Imaging turning 90 minutes into 45 minutes, and having an easier time focusing on it so that it’s more engaging and interesting. That’s what makes this such an amazing life hack for students.
13. Build a Strong Foundation With Easier Classes
Some of your classes are going to be a lot easier than other ones. That doesn’t mean you should coast to a B on the easier classes and then struggle to get a B on the harder ones. Instead, put in the effort to get the highest grades you possible can in the easier classes, to give yourself a bit more leeway on the trickier classes while still keeping up a good GPA.
The classes you take in your earlier high school years are going to be easier than the ones later on, so this is an opportunity to bolster your grades.
This doesn’t mean you should go around taking all of the easiest classes possible, but when you do have a class that’s easier, make the most of it. Instead of coasting to a B, why not push for an A+? It could come in really handy someday when you’re close to reaching a milestone with your GPA.
14. Learn To Cook Quick Meals as a Student
You can make scrambled eggs in the microwave, easily, inside of a coffee cup. It’s perfect if you’re living that dorm life and you don’t always have clean dishes or if you don’t feel like pulling out your hotplate or stove. Learning to cook decent food in the microwave comes in very useful.
You can also steam veggies in the microwave very nicely, and cook a lot of different things. See all of those buttons and settings on the front of your microwave? Once you figure out what they mean, you’ll be able to step your microwave game up to the next level, and do a lot better than frozen entrees.
It’ll take you 10 minutes to watch a video about how to use a microwave to make quick meals in college, and a little bit of practice, and you’ll be able to cook healthy, fast, cheap, and easy meals for yourself and you’ll save a fortune compared to buying take-out or delivery.
15. Life Hack To Stop Your Pens From Getting Stolen
If you are sick and tired of having your pens stolen, here’s a little trick that’ll help keep the thieves at bay. Buy a red pen, and some blue ink refills. Put the blue ink refill inside your red pen. Now, when someone’s looking for a pen, they’ll pass by your red pen and keep looking because they probably don’t want to write in red.
Red pens are stolen a lot less often because people simple don’t use them nearly as often. This would also work by putting black ink inside a red pen’s body, or whatever other color.
If you use those cheaper Bic pens where it’s just the lid that is a different color, that makes this even easier to switch things up and throw any would-be pen thieves off the trail.
16. Student Life Hacks To Cool a Drink Very Quickly
Hot day? Need a cold drink? Here’s a fun and easy life hack for students who want to cool down quickly. Instead of just putting your can of soda in the freezer, dampen a paper towel first, wrap it around your drink, and then put your can into the freezer and it will get hold a lot more quickly.
This works a lot more quickly than using the fridge or trying to cool a drink in the freezer without using a damp cloth or paper towel.
17. Student Life Hack: Use Alarms For More Than Waking Up
Waking up with an alarm is a rite of passage for many people who have places to go and things to do, especially once they start living on their own or don’t have their parents waking them up every morning.
But have you ever considered using alarms for other things? And we’re not just taking about naps!
You can set an alarm for a certain time to start studying, then have a second alarm for when you want your studying session to be done. This way, you can make plans to be productive ahead of time, so that even if you don’t feel like doing it at the time the alarm goes off, it can give you that extra little boost of motivation. Here are some ideas of productive activities for teenagers that will benefit your life in a lot of different ways.
You can also use an alarm to remind you to do something fun, to take a break, to play some online games for teens, or however else you like to unwind and relax after studying or working for a while.
Final Thoughts on High School Hacks
There are a lot of other good high school hacks and some of them are probably unique to your own school. Maybe there’s a teacher who likes to give everyone very high marks as long as they show up and try, or another teacher who is notoriously difficult to understand… These are the types of things that we can’t help you with on this website, but talking to older students could reveal some useful tips and tricks and high school hacks that’ll help you get through your years there.
