If you are a senior or academic overachiever you may have known that already, but you might have not known why options are so limited.
First, what were the options? Last year, students received a course selection form that they could fill out. The expected classes seniors could have picked were: Personal Finance, QRAT, Pre-calc, and Calculus.
Two of these options aren’t even available this year — QRAT and Calculus, which hardly happens.
When asked about the missing status of QRAT, Math teacher, Vicki Burrell said, “(QRAT) is definitely a good class. I would highly recommend any student who has algebra two, who doesn’t really want to go into the calculus realm. It’s a really good class to reinforce those skills. We just didn’t have enough signups.”
Calculus is also missing from our school this year.
When asked about this, math and science teacher, Peter Gammelgard said, “I think that for the students that are ready for calculus, it’s a huge loss for them. Often students who are going to take calculus in their high school career, they’re bound for a college course to study.
“That might be something like engineering or math or something, where having calculus in high school prepares them for that route and not offering a course like that, it’s a loss for the students who are ready for calculus in high school.”
The math teachers pushed against the district’s decision to not offer some of these classes, but were ultimately unable to change the district’s decision.
The remaining senior math classes aren’t exactly abundant either, with only one pre-calc period and two personal finance periods. The senior math teachers believe that many seniors don’t want to continue with math, but they have differing suspicions why.
Math teacher Kara Scheitlin said, “It’s kind of human nature to be like ‘Do I want to have a period off and be able to take it easy, or do homework, or whatever, or do I want to be sitting in a challenging math class?’”
Burrell said, “Our school got smaller, the signups became less and we no longer have enough signups this year or last year to offer (those classes).”
Gammelgard said, “I think that the opportunities for eighth graders in the fall of 2020 in math were severely limited by Covid. I think that that’s one of those things that, here we are four years later, we’re seeing it.”
“I hope that going forward, the seventh graders in fall of 2020 were given the opportunity as eighth graders in fall of 2021 to re-engage in that option. So we’ll see. I suspect that this is a one-off.”
Even with their differing opinions, these math teachers can all agree on one thing. Just because you’re a senior and don’t need another year of math doesn’t mean you should be done going down your math avenue — you still need to think about your future.