At GA, privileges are handed to students as they get older. This includes getting to choose what electives students would like to take as classes. Some of the electives, such as humanities classes, can’t be taken until a student is a senior. But should they really wait until senior year?
Personally, I think that humanities electives should be available for underclassmen. Although it is currently hard to fit an elective into a freshman schedule, there are solutions: humanities classes for them can be like a seminar class where they only meet once a rotation, or it can rotate with gym, where some days the student has gym and other days they have an elective.
One reason for this proposed change is that humanities classes can teach basic life skills to humans, such as public speaking, how to manage money and ethics. Lessons like these can really open up a student’s mind and expose them to the world, which should be done sooner rather than later.
Another reason is that in Junior and Senior year, when most of the humanities electives are available, most Juniors and Seniors are busy with a lot of other stuff outside of school such as, colleges and life outside of the classroom, so how can they possibly fit another class into their already busy schedule? Doing electives earlier gives students the time to learn about humanitarian subjects.
Lastly, during Community Time, there are a bunch of activities or speakers that relate to the world and can be taught in humanities classes, but the time of them is too short.
This doesn’t give students the time to reflect, so adding on humanities classes while having speakers ongoing, can really help shape a student’s knowledge of the world.
For freshmen, it can be like a ninth-grade seminar class or a minimester, two to three times a rotation. Then for juniors and seniors who have a bit more flexibility, it can be in a daily rotation.
This would benefit the community because opening the underclassmen to see what both humanities and stem classes has to offer can help them find their interests quicker and help them have an idea of what they want to do in college, preparing them for what college has to offer.
In conclusion, being able to take humanities classes would benefit the underclassmen mostly by teaching them insights into new skills, and although it might seem impossible, it is very easy to fit them into their schedule.