New classes present opportunities and challenges for students and teachers alike. This year, students were offered five new courses: Art of Multimedia (previously the Art of Video), AP Computer Science, Yoga and Pilates, Personal Finance and Career Choices.
Many classes seem to be off to a running start. Junior Elaine Hsu, who takes the newly offered Yoga and Pilates class, says, “It’s good—its just a really chill class … It’s a good intro to [yoga], and a lot of people like it because it’s really relaxing, and even though it’s not that intense, it still has the same effect.”
Career Choices, a class that helps students create a plan and set up goals for furture careers, is off to a strong beginning. This single-semester class is followed by a different class, Personal Finance. After taking a career assessment test, students explore career options for their life after Aragon. Senior Kyle Pascoe, who takes Career Choices, says, “I like how it’s really focused on our future, and they bring in guest speakers about every week, which is good. [The teacher brings in] different careers that people in the class want to pursue.”
However, some classes did not turn out the way students expected. Many in AP Computer Science were surprised by the workload and difficulty relative to their expectations. Teacher Lisa Kossiver says, “I think there were some misperceptions on the students’ part that they thought it was going to be, you know, an easy class.”
“It’s a little bit of a harder subject to wrap your head around, especially at the pace we’re going at the moment,” says junior Ben Maisonpierre.
Maisonpierre has had to help his classmates outside of the class. However, Kossiver argues that it may be a good aspect of the class, saying, “It’s actually learning a new way of helping each other and working together.”
Art of Multimedia has experienced a changed curriculum due to a lack in technology, even having to change the course name due to the lack of video production—it was originally called The Art of Video. “Video software on all these computers this year … well we’re going to have to get very creative. I’ll put it that way,” says teacher Nicholas Carrillo.
Without sufficient funding to upgrade each computer, Carrillo is without any form of technology that can run the video software, which resulted in some students dropping the class. “The issue is, when we say there’s the art of video, then unfortunately we have to cut back … to the point where it’s not even the art of video anymore. Students get frustrated, teachers get frustrated, and they drop. I can’t blame them at all,” he says.
Junior Jeremiah Rondeau agrees, but nevertheless enjoys the class, saying, “It’s a little bit more student-driven than the core classes. You get to obviously exercise creativity, but unlike various art classes, because it’s computer design, it’s always looking to be a little bit different.” Although not the class many students expected, the elective still has received positive feedback, which has raised hopes for more funding in future years.
Administration had planned to offer two new classes. AP Music Theory and Peer Helping, but these plans did not materialize.
AP Music Theory was last offered three years ago, breaking the previous cycle of every other year. The class was set to come back last year, but an additional ensemble maxed out the number of classes the music department could offer. The class was planned to be offered this year, but without enough sign-ups, music teacher Troy Davis had to decide between cutting a music class of 45 to offer the under-populated class of AP Music Theory, and to him that didn’t seem fair.
Davis says, “If we had run it, we would have had to drop one of our other music classes. We couldn’t justify that.”
Peer Helping is another course did not occur this year. This year-long course would have had one semester for training and one for actual projects. Students would choose to either become a peer helper, where they would become involved with conflict resolution, or a peer educator, where students would have the opportunity to make presentations about specific educational topics.
Despite this, peer tutoring is still available on campus. In terms of the peer helping class, English teacher Vince Bravo says, “There is definitely an interest in the things Peer Helping would do on campus. I think that as we continue to talk about our WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges) goals … I think that more and more people who make decisions will hopefully see that Peer Helping would meet with or help with some of those goals.”
