by Anisa Vigil & Zoie Wong
At a school as big as James Logan High School, with almost 3,400 students, a variety of classes outside the core curriculum are offered for every student to find their interests and pursue them. These elective classes strive to teach students critical thinking skills through personal and shared experiences. Elective classes include but are not limited to ethnic studies courses, psychology, and the critical living program.
“We have writing and all of the standard things, but we’re also really more focused on building community and providing students with the tools they need to survive to just get through life,” Marisa Villegas, an Ethnic Studies and Life Skills teacher, said. “Many students also want to experience the perspectives of other communities. And it gives them an opportunity to draw comparisons and similarities between our experience and theirs.”
Elective teachers may not have tried and true methods or state and content standards to draw from and must build their courses around community-based hands-on learning according to Logan teacher Mr. Jeremy Vitug.
“Critical living skills [are] basic skills that we address in class like counting coins, identifying the coins, or crossing the street safely,” Vitug said.
Furthermore, Stacey Diaz, a psychology and life skills teacher, emphasizes that teaching relevant content is important for young teenagers to recognize concepts and apply them to their own life.
“By presenting the content and tying it to life, it can sometimes hit a nerve or a trigger for some students,” Diaz said. “Therefore, making sure that students are taking care of themselves and getting directed to resources can help dive deeper into reflecting on their own lives.”
In ethnic studies, students have the opportunity to learn more about not only their own but also other cultures. These classes focus on the inclusivity of all identities and encourage activism on campus.
“We all come from cultures where our ancestors have left something for us; we just haven’t necessarily been taught to connect with that. So I want my students to feel grounded in that ancestral knowledge and take that knowledge to propel them into who they want to be in the future,” Villegas said.
Electives at Logan go further than instilling academically rigorous skills: they teach social awareness and problem-solving skills that extend beyond education at institutions. For example, instead of learning how to long divide or identify verbs in sentences, elective classes offer solutions to real-life problems.
“I see it often where a person who’s super book smart both in K-12 education and later on in university at 22-23 years old with a degree, doesn’t know how to change a light bulb or wipe the floor,” Vitug said.
Courses deviating from the core curriculum establish the backbone of Logan by fostering collaboration, teamwork, and trust between our students and staff.
“The way that we interact with our students and teach our courses have a more humanistic perspective that we take in, in teaching and in building community,” Villegas said.
