It’s just that crazy time of year again.
Teachers scramble to fit in midterms and finals in a rapidly closing quarterly window. Coaches and players are gearing up for both the start and finish of many sports seasons. Even the weather is all over the place, with every day bringing some new atmospheric malady or odd climatic shift.
And amidst all this chaos and distress, students at Oakton have yet another worry sliding onto their palettes: course selection for the next year.
Even with the next school year over 7 months away, the time for choosing your courses for the year has already come around, and for many students the surprise is already manifesting itself.
With all the courses offered at Oakton in a normal school-year (totaling within the hundreds), this process is naturally going to be hard. This is especially the case for those high-achieving students hoping to get the most out of their course selections going into their new year.
“The whole course selection process sounds like it should be easy, but if you’re a top student who has a lot of choices to make then it can get tough,” said sophomore Will Rippey. “I think it’s also a really big problem for people who want to take academic classes with their elective spots. There’s big pressure to get the AP classes, and it’s tough to choose when you’re getting 9,000 AP’s thrown at you.”
While it can be quite difficult, making your course selections is a doable process, so long as you put some thought into it and take advantage of the resources available to you.
One of the key aides available to help you choose your classes for the upcoming year is the annual curriculum fair held during mid-January. During the curriculum fair, students have a chance to visit the teachers of all different courses, and get a chance to hear about the expectations of the classes they’re interested in taking.
Unfortunately, the event is widely viewed as a bit of a joke, and most students treat it as such, attending sessions only to fool around and hang out with their friends. If students were to take it more seriously, however, the curriculum fair could play a crucial role in their choices for the next year.
“If not as many people goofed off during the fair it’d be very helpful to make class decisions. The problem, though, is that not everyone takes it seriously, and if you don’t take it seriously you get absolutely nothing out of it,” Rippey said. “Some of my sister’s friends didn’t even go anywhere during the fair. They just sat around in one of their teacher’s classrooms the whole time.”
Even if you don’t have time to stop by a teacher’s room during the curriculum fair, but still find their class to be interesting, take some initiative and stop by their room on your own time. Instructors will appreciate their enthusiasm, and will be more than happy to answer all your questions about their class.
Aside from visiting the curriculum fair and individual teachers of a course, another useful asset available to students is their guidance counselor. The guidance counselors at Oakton are among the best in the county, and have invaluable knowledge about the courses you are considering to take next year. Remember, these counselors have helped countless students before you that likely had the same questions as you do, and they are more than happy to help you manage successfully through this process.
The resources available to you in making your selections are numerous, and the ways they can help you vary across the board. But among all the resources you have at your fingertips, the most valuable is really just yourself. Making course selections is difficult, but as long as you put some thought into it, and analyze all the information you have available to you, the whole process will sort itself out.
In a letter to the school, Principal Banbury said it himself: “the decisions you make over the next several weeks regarding your course selections are the most important factors that will determine how next year will go.” The course selection process is important, and if you want to reap the best results, you just need to put in your best efforts.
It’s a crazy time of year, yes, but that is no excuse for crazy thinking. So get your head straight, take advantage of the help you have, and make sure that your course selections for next year are the best which they can be.
