SK Should Open up Alternate Options for Core Classes
In recent years, career-guided pathway programs have been installed at SKHS, allowing students new courses to choose from and aid them in preparing for a future career. These pathways meet graduation requirements and allow for the replacements of core classes with related courses such as taking carpentry as a replacement for math, and the science and social studies departments offer a variety of selections to meet three credit requirement.
However other subjects offer practically no choice in the matter. For example, the school requires four and a half credits of English to graduate but choosing honors or regular is the only decision students can make.
The Language Arts department offers a larger range of interesting classes, but as fulfilling necessary courses takes up a great chunk of one’s schedule, there remains not enough room to take alternative electives.
Some of these electives, such as creative or autobiographical writing, and various literature classes, might interest some students more than a general education class of the same subject. However, several classes listed in the handbook have not been run in years due to lack of demand. After all, what student wants to take another ELA or science class if they must already take one?
If students had the choice to replace required courses with these alternatives, they could be more eager to learn and willing to branch out and try different classes.
It has been proven multiple times and is a common fact at this point that people learn better when they find their subject matter engaging and enjoy it. An economics and psychology professor at Carnegie Melon University, George Loewenstein, wrote in the paper “The Psychology of Curiosity,” that when a person is curious, “the individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.”
On the flip side, the education of students across the country seems to be on the decline. According to the ACT Annual Report, in 2019, only 59% of high school graduates met the English benchmark, compared to 64% in 2015 and only 39% met the math benchmark, compared to 42% in 2015. Additionally, to many students, school has become about merely about passing and the grade, not learning.
This makes mandating courses in certain subjects, understandable, but forcing students to take the same traditional classes every year will not necessarily yield better results either. No matter how many times facts are drilled into someone’s head, if they are not stimulated by the content, or uninterested, very little of the information will be absorbed or remembered.
This raises the question: are these required courses necessary? Or should the rules be loosened to accommodate more students by letting them fulfill the same amount of credits through electives in the same subject area? As long as a student is proficient in the subject with a satisfactory grade, they should be allowed the choice to take other courses within the same branch of study.
