For most students at Seaholm, the content in the math and science classes are tough enough. But add in a trimester break without one of these courses, and critics say students are being set up to fail.
“It’s going to be hard to remember everything after an entire semester’s break,” said senior Rachel Reem, a student with PreCalculus A first trimester and PreCalculus B third trimester. “It’s going to be hard to pick back up again.”
“It’s going to be tough,” said senior Jessica Stanley, who has a semester break between Physics A and B. “The start of physics B is supposed to be very difficult and I’ll have forgotten the things we learned in the 1st trimester.”
Among students, the break in trimesters between 2 classes is a common gripe, but these hallway complaints have yet to make it to administrators.
“We’ve only had 2 or 3 individual complaints,” said Principal Terry Piper.
According to Piper, the issue lies in the formatting of the schedules by the computer system. It is given a list of courses and students, then formats the schedules so that the largest amount of students can get the classes that they would like to take.
“We can lock in courses, so that the A and B part of a course follow each other, but that gives the system less freedom to schedule other courses,” said Piper. Seaholm math teacher Leslie Martin is skeptical of how this affects students.
“I think that some students can forget things, fundamental concepts, when there’s a break during a mathematics course,” Martin said. “I sure wouldn’t like the break.”
Cynthia Price, another math teacher at Seaholm, sees this as an even larger problem.
“A break between 1st and 3rd trimester is livable, but a break from the end of a 2nd trimester to the [next year’s] second trimester is horrific,” said Price. “It’s just not fair to the students.”
Senior Stephen Burke had math 3rd trimester last year and didn’t have it again until this trimester.
“It’s terrible; I’ve forgotten so much of what I’ve learned in math,” said Burke. “It even affected my fall ACT, as I hadn’t done math equations in so long.”
But according to Piper, students’ grades are not suffering as a result of frequent splits. “If anything, our students’ grades have increased slightly,” Piper said. Before switching to the trimester schedule, Seaholm administrators conferred with other districts in the trimester format and asked specifically about their student’s grades and found that there was not much of a fall-off in grades, which also holds true at Seaholm.
But if good grades are not the case for everyone, Piper said that an individual who needs these courses back to back can talk to their counselors about making the change. While the student may not get all of the courses that he or she would like, they could potentially have better grades in math and science with their classes back to back.
So while students may complain to one another, it seems as though frequent splits in math and science classes are not going to change in the near future. Unless there are large amounts of students looking for the change, it is likely that the problem will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
