Every year, many classes are proposed for implementation into the curriculum. However, this year, over ten of these classes did not make their way list of course offerings for 2012-2013, among them being Accounting, Shakespeare, Topics in Modern Math, American’s Women History, and Guitar.
According to principal David Sondheim, when a course isn’t inserted into the curriculum, it is usually because not enough students sign up for the particular class.
“Students sign up for a course, and once we tally all the student requests, if we don’t have enough students who signed up to run what’s a reasonably full section, then we don’t run the class,” Sondheim said.
Wendy Stratton, head of the physical education department, believes that a lot of the elective classes that don’t receive the minimum enrollment would be very beneficial to students if they were offered.
“Redwood is such an academic school,” Stratton said. “A lot of students are bent on getting every last AP [class] into their schedule, which makes it hard to ask students to make balanced choices and take something different that would actually be really good for them.”
In the physical education department specifically, Stratton said that there have been around four or five classes that they have tried to put out each year. However, most of them rarely get passed due to an inadequate number of requests from students.
“We have to get at least 27 or 28 signups for every class,” Stratton said. “Yoga is great, and of course there are a good 18 kids who want to take a yoga class, and we do get those kinds of numbers. But that just isn’t high enough”
Stratton also mentioned that a lot of departments have tried integrating their elective classes in order to appeal to a wider variety of students. For example, the P.E. teachers are trying to narrow down their electives into one weightlifting class that would incorporate multiple things, even though this wasn’t their original objective.
“A lot of us teachers would be really excited to teach our passion,” Stratton said. “I would love to teach a yoga class, I know Brabo would love to teach a dance class, the same way that a science teacher loves integrated science, but also gets to teach physiology. Our teachers really want to have some fun stuff we can dig into with kids at a higher level.”
According to Sondheim, a course like weightlifting could be passed even if there are only enough sign-ups to fill up one class.
“There are a lot of classes that run for only one period,” Sondheim said. “Yearbook is a section that only runs for one period, AP Computer Programming is one period only, and there’s only one section of psychology and philosophy.”
Sondheim also said that the faculty tries the best they can to offer a variety of options for students.
“The real question is, ‘are there enough students interested in taking a particular class?’” Sondheim said. “We have to have teacher availability, and have to have the physical space to run the class. You can imagine where we can’t have one or two students in a class with a teacher, and so we always have to evaluate that.”
