Beginning each year is difficult for a lot of high school students. After an entire summer, students are expected to pick up where they left off, and that includes classes, relationships and workload. Next year, there are changes coming for the art and history departments.
Next year, the freshmen will be introduced to a new way of learning world history. Their health/physical education class will be combined with world history on an A-B schedule. This means the class will alternate. One day students will go to history, and the next, to health/P.E. The class length during the day will stay the same, but each class will become year-long so that the students will have enough time to learn the material for both classes.
History teacher Skip Thibault says that there is a need for this new method.
“When we look at the statistics, the kids that struggle most coming to high school are the ninth graders. The transition from middle to high school is really tough,” said Thibault.
During first semester this year, 136 of 305 freshmen failed a class, and 94 different freshmen failed a class in the first six-week term of the spring semester.
It’s that struggle that made Northwood look into helping those students. The main goal of this new method is to change the success rates of freshmen.
“It is to [help] freshmen transition more successfully into high school,” said Thibault.
History teacher Phillip Little said that the idea for this new way of introducing students to high school came from other schools.
“A lot of schools have something called freshman academy: all of the freshmen are in one place in the school, separated from the rest of the population, and they have a core group of teachers that teach them,” said Little.
The idea that Northwood is proposing for next year involves teaching all of the socialization skills and class bonding in a normal class environment.
“We are not going to have an honors section and a general section either; we are going to have them all together,” said Thibault.
The honor students will be given a special project to work on during the class along with their other work, and at the end, they will receive honors credit, but they will remain in the class with all levels of students. The idea behind this is that the non-honors students will see the compared workload and decide to work harder as well.
Instead of spending extra money, a team of teachers came together to create a freshmen academy environment in a way that would not cost Northwood.
According to Little, adding P.E. to a history class allows the freshmen to get excited about the idea.
“We want this to be their absolute favorite class,” said Little.
In addition to the new history method, there will also be a new band class for both underclassmen and upperclassmen that will be taught by band director Eugene Cottrell. This class will be for beginning instrumentalists, meaning those students who chose, for any reason, not to take band in middle school and still wish to learn how to play an instrument.
Cottrell plans for this class to give students an opportunity to learn how to play any wind or percussion instrument. Student who take this class would then be able to perform with the band if they wish to.
There will be a new advanced guitar class that will be taught by guitar and voice instructor, Marilyn Shugart, for students going into 10th grade or higher.
“[This class will be] for the students who have been through [Guitar I] and learned to read music, learned to read tab and excelled,” said Shugart. “I had a number [of students] who came in not knowing anything, and left being really good guitar players because they worked really hard. Learning music and learning a new instrument is like learning a foreign language; it’s not easy.”
To create this new class, Shugart said the only thing she had to do was talk to Principal Chris Blice.
“[Blice] gives us a tremendous amount of support down here and he saw that the kids needed something else to be able to continue to motivate them to play,” said Shugart.
Blice believes that the larger number of students contributes to this increasing number of electives.
“I think the fact that we do have larger numbers than we’ve had in the past dictates that we have to have more elective choices,” said Blice.
However, it is arguable that the high number of freshmen could also lead to the cutting of some English and social studies electives. This is because the teachers must all cater to the incoming students to make sure they all get through the core English and history classes that they must take. Therefore, there will be fewer available teachers to teach classes like military history, creative writing and journalism.
“We are looking at the registration numbers and trying to decide exactly what the effect will be,” Blice said. “Classes may be a little larger than we like but I am hoping that we are not going to have to drop anything.”
– By Michaela Johnson