During the most stress-filled time in most high schoolers’ lives, senior year, the few spare minutes we can muster up to do homework, work on college applications, or occasionally relax are becoming exceedingly difficult to come by.
Luckily, tradition has held for years that students have at least one period free every week during their given religion class hour, valuable time that students– seniors in particular– desperately need. However, on the first day of school, most juniors and seniors were slapped in the face with a terrible realization: the free period has been revoked, and “Wellness” has taken its place.
The Wellness course will be taught to all juniors and seniors during this school year; seniors during first semester and juniors during second semester, and is quite frankly ridiculous. As seniors, during our four years in high school we have learned to adapt to our surroundings and handle stress.
We have taken countless religion courses and have learned more than our fair share about “Spirit,” have taken physical education classes, health class, and science classes to master “Body,” and have the opportunity to take psychology to cover “Mind,” the three main components of the class.
If anyone should be forced to spend 45 minutes every week learning how to handle our “Body, Spirit, and Mind”, it should be freshman who are still learning the ropes and obviously need more assistance than those who have years of experience under their belts regarding the comings and goings of adolescence.
The course will count towards the theology grade of each student, but making the class 10% of the theology grades is an obvious way to force students to attend and participate in a class that would be undoubtedly seen as ridiculous to most students.
The subject matter: stress, over-worked students, and basically handling the every-day issues every human faces, have already been covered in the Health course, mandatory for graduation and typically taken freshman year.
The course should be an optional seminar-type presentation, not a semester-long waste of time for all students. People who need the assistance that such a course provides should attend, however the majority of students would benefit from nothing more than if they were to have one more free hour during the week.
Claire • Oct 8, 2009 at 1:15 am
If students don’t have the skills needed to handle stress by the time they reach the first day of Jr. year they wont have it. Trying to teach them that skill when they are 8th and 9th graders makes sense but putting an added pressure on to Jrs who already have to much of it and Srs. who should by the point know how much is to much for themselves, seems like a waste of time, and resources.
I am full time college student, with a part time job and I volunteer 20-40 hours a week and still manage to sleep, eat and get all of my homework done. I didn’t have class that taught me how to do that. Each person is an individual and each persons limits can not be found in a textbook they have to be figured out with experience.
I’m glad i graduated when I did, because I’m not sure if the student body is benefitting from the changes that BSM is making.
Kathleen Ambre • Sep 13, 2009 at 7:45 pm
I totally agree with you.
Over the past three years, seniors have adaptively learned their limits (how many hard classes they can handle) and how to manage the stress in their lives.
Informing the less experienced, I can agree with. Underclassmen may need a few pointers before reaching BSM’s most academically challenging year, junior year. But, learning how to manage and control stressful circumstances is not something you can teach out of a textbook, it’s something you instinctively learn overtime.