School is often defined by traditional classes and learning, but the classroom often falls short when preparing students for real-world situations. Students should be given more options for different classes that shadow life outside of school. We believe that BSM should provide a wider range of classes that encourage responsibility and leadership skills that will be useful in professional life.

Currently, BSM has a small number of classes that do their part to prepare students for their future outside of a lecture setting. Some of these include Investments and Portfolio Management, Personal Finance, Engineering, Faith in Action, Yearbook, and Journalism; they all help to promote a wider range of skills for students to take with them after graduation. Investments and Portfolio Management, a business class, tries to give students hands-on experience in the business world by allowing students to work with actual money and intends to teach them about various investment strategies. Engineering III is a class that focuses on a year-long project of building a robot that the students go on and use in the FIRST Robotics Competition in June. Similar to Engineering, Yearbook and Journalism are student-led. A teacher is present to guide the class, but the students are the ones who work on the pages and publish the yearbook or the newspaper while the teacher acts as more of an advisor.

As a class, we are incredibly grateful for the opportunity and experiences that these classes provide. As members of journalism and publishers of the BSM Knight Errant, we truly believe that we have been given skills that we wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else. We have gained the responsibility to create, finish, and publish the newspaper––online, in print, and in a magazine––in a timely manner while working with our classmates as a team to get the job done. We control our projects and how we learn while having our teacher as a guide.

Even though we appreciate the option to take these classes, we believe that all students should be required to take Personal Finance, a business class, even if students aren’t interested in business. Finances are a reality of adulthood and this class could help students truly understand money, budgeting, and taxes. It could help reduce future stress and truly prepare students for the parts of the world that are often overlooked in education.

In addition to these classes, we believe that more individualized projects and opportunities like these are incredibly beneficial to the BSM student body. For example, we believe that a senior capstone project could potentially help build essential skills that students wouldn’t be able to find in a normal classroom setting. In other schools in the Twin Cities, seniors spend the last month of the school year working on projects or internships that cater to their preferred job field and interests. If seniors experienced this non-traditional capstone idea they will be more prepared for life outside of high school using the techniques they learned.

BSM has a good variety of classes that are truly beneficial for students, but there need to be more opportunities for students to control how they learn and what they learn. Classes and experiences like these can provide the skills needed for students to thrive outside of school.