Student Spotlight: Reese Fogaros
Imagine you are a first-year law student but your advisor forces you to sign up for an entrepreneur class that meets every day. This logic doesn’t make sense, right? A college student aspiring to be a lawyer, instead learning about how to be an entrepreneur?
A story like that is especially unrealistic when it comes to students’ schedules in college. However, it is not a far-fetched issue when talking about the requirements high schools have for students. According to the US Department of Education, 95.2% of high schools in the US require physical education to graduate. Think about how much time in a school year that a fitness class is occupying. Every student has a different path they want to take in life, so why should every student have to take the same classes in order to graduate?
As a high school student who is constantly having to think about their future, I know that I would rather take an Economics class as opposed to a U.S. History class because I want to do something with business when I’m older. Despite this fact, I was required last year to take U.S. history, and this is where the issue lies. High schools are requiring students to take courses that don’t interest the student, in the end, wasting both the student and the teacher’s time.
Now imagine the same law student is instead enrolled in a course that teaches the basics of being a lawyer. Already, one can assume that the student will be much more engaged in class, due to the fact that they know that the information they retain through the course will benefit them in their future career. In fact, Annie Murphy Paul, an author for the New York Times, said that “interest can help us think more clearly, understand more deeply, and remember more accurately.” This being said, if students got to choose which classes they are in, they would be much more likely to succeed in school because they are actually interested in what they are learning about.
Some people may say that students should be required to take certain classes so that they have exposure to topics that they never would have explored without the class. Exposure is key when it comes to deciding what you want to do with your life, but it should not be required because although some people may feel the need to explore each topic offered at school, a good amount of students have an idea of what they are interested in.
Administrators creating a new process when building schedules where students can choose which classes they think could benefit them in the future will make school feel like a place where students retain knowledge, instead of it going in one ear and out the other. This fact also helps set up the student’s future. Instead of wasting a period on a class that doesn’t have to do with what the student wants to do in life, the student can use that period to continue to learn about what they aspire to do when they are older.
Which student would you rather be? Would you want to be the student that learns about integrated science when they instead have always dreamt of being a musician? Or would you want to be the student that is in AP Music Theory studying their way to become the next big artist?