Long advisement classes confuse students
Bobby Zuiss, Editor-in-Chief
February 18, 2010
Filed under Opinion
For the past two weeks, every student in the high school has been required to attend extended Tutorial sessions in order for the underclassmen to complete their schedules for the 2010-2011 school year. While the extended time is understandable, many students are still left in the dark about which classes are important. While this happens, seniors are left with seemingly endless spans of time for career planning workshops. The school’s counseling department could have made the painful experience of creating a schedule much more tolerable by making several changes in the way Tutorial was planned out.
To begin with, a major problem that seems to be affecting the class-selecting process for underclassmen is the lack of knowledge about what is offered here at BHS. As a senior, I have gone through all four years of schedule creation and can honestly say that as a freshman and sophomore I had no idea what I was placing into my senior schedule. Although it is good to have a general idea of what is in store for the future, advice from upperclassmen can go a long way. Upon looking at the course description book, underclassmen have trouble deciphering the difference between difficult classes and easy classes. By sharing past experience with sophomores and juniors, seniors could help out tremendously during Tutorial. While the course description book does in fact provide a short description of all the classes (gasp!), students should probably read more than the two or three sentences provided in the book before selecting a class they will have to sit through for an entire school year.
Another change that would benefit students would be a change to the way the classes are laid out in the course description book. While everything is nice and neat, it quickly becomes confusing for students to sign up for a progression of classes (ie. Algebra II-College Algebra-Trigonometry). Another bad experience many students have had with the class selection process is finding out several weeks later that two or more of their classes are on the same hour. This leads to further changes to a schedule for many students, which in turn makes it almost impossible to get into the counseling office for almost a week. Although it would take more planning on the teachers’ behalf, it would be best if students could go into a computer program where everything is more user friendly and set up schedules from there.
In the end, the only classes that are critical for underclassmen to have a strong grip on are the ones they will be taking next year. The process of selecting classes is a difficult and long one, but should be given serious thought and planning. Though students are only given a limited time to choose classes, their decisions today will affect many of their tomorrows.
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