By Callum Wilsie
As the end of the school year draws near, the school administration must make decisions on which classes will be available next year, and which ones will be cut. As school enrollment numbers get smaller and smaller, fewer people apply to be teachers, and more and more teachers leave for different districts. Schools will inevitably mull over cutting small classes like choir, ceramics, or French–but they never focus on the most useless class.
Get Focused is a ‘life skill’ class for all freshmen. In Get Focused, you research prices and salaries for various jobs and commodities. With these numbers, you create a “Ten Year Plan” for the next decade of your future. Get Focused is a required class. This means if you fail it, or don’t take it, you can not graduate until you make it up. In addition to being required, Get Focused is also not successful at what it tries to do.
One student interviewed said, “It was horrible, I learned a little but not much.” Two other students said, in simpler terms, “It sucks.” Practically every student that takes Get Focused is left with nothing. Get Focused does not teach you to cook, register to vote, drive, file taxes, clean properly, or any of the other various requirements of being an adult. One anonymous former BHS student said, “I didn’t really learn anything new [from Get Focused], except for the Maslow’s triangle of basic needs.”
In Home Economics, you learn things such as cooking, child development, sewing, home management, economics and budgeting, and health. BHS used to have home economics classes, and even more recently had a cooking class. When the cooking teacher left, this class was canceled, but BHS has the resources available to reimplement this class.
When you compare Home Economics—a class with hands-on direct learning of life skills—with Get Focused—a class where you write in a book and do equations to create a detailed plan for your future at fourteen—it’s clear which one is more helpful. Fourteen year olds have no idea what they’re doing in life, and a much stronger attention span when it comes to actual hands-on activities. If BHS is going to make any life skill class mandatory, it should be Home Economics.
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