New Course Additions

In the 2024-2025 school year, the School will rework some existing curriculums and add several new courses. According to Academic Dean Shahana Sarkar, the Upper School is growing due to a large incoming freshman class. Because of this, they create more room to add new courses and give students a wider variety of course options. Sarkar says, “We try to make sure kids can see themselves in the curriculum in some way, shape, or form.” 

The current Computer Science curriculum will be arranged into Computer Science 1, 2, 3, and 4 instead of the individual courses such as MOOD and Data Structures. However, the actual content of the classes will be very similar to what they are now. The goal of this is to make the courses more cohesive and organized. 

In addition to the change in curriculum, there will be a few new classes added to the roster of offerings at the School. Classes are often inspired by teachers’ ideas or the requests students make at the School. Sarkar expands on this, saying, “We have amazing teachers who have really good, exciting, cool ideas. If we can actually make them happen, that’s great.” One added class will be an Introduction to Graphics course for incoming freshmen taught by Cheye Pagel, hopefully preparing students to be on the Graphics staff later in high school. Kyong Pak and Courtney Duke will be co-teaching a senior history course about Asian American history through music, food, and pop culture. 

Yosup Joo, a current Chemistry and Ethnic Studies teacher at the School, will be teaching a new spring-semester psychology elective. Joo, who has 15 years of previous psychology teaching experience, comments, “It’s the best class I’ve ever taught for a high school student. Every question that adolescents have can get answered by this class.” According to Joo, the course will focus on demonstrations and research on topics like the relation between political leanings and the perception of abstract art, or the effects of watching scary movies on the brain. The course will cover topics such as neuroscience, social psychology, and the power of peer pressure. The class will also be more abstractly structured, involving experiments and projects that will allow students to more deeply connect with the subject. Joo says, “[Psychology] is such a cool lens to see the world through. I’m thrilled to be able to teach it, and I can’t express that enough.”  

Another exciting addition to the School’s curriculum is a Spanish class centered around digital music production, which will be taught by Vincente Ramirez-Jurado, the current Spanish 2 and Spanish 4 Honors teacher. The course will cover beat making, sound editing and track mixing in Spanish through Logic Pro, focusing mostly on electronic music like techno and EDM. There is no musical prerequisite for the class, although Spanish 4 must be completed. The class will also have opportunities to work with local artists and possibly student performances at a local venue. Jurado emphasizes that the class is meant to encourage creativity, saying, “The whole goal is to get students that learn using technology [to] respond better with innovative learning.”