High School Report 3
The high school has the following courses:
- Football
- Basketball
- Volleyball (girls only)
- Track and field
- Home economics
- Agriculture (caring for your personal sheep, potting plants, welding, etc.)
- Health (hygiene, drugs, sex, etc. Especially lots of drugs.)
- English
- Spanish
- English for Spanish-speakers
- Math
- History
- Geography (beginning this year in Texas schools. Texas universities aren’t offering Geography yet, so this class is per definition taught by unqualified people.)
- Science (combination of physics and chemistry)
- Biology
- Band (the school band. See Mr. Holland’s Opus.)
- Drawing
- Driving (only three students can be in the car with the teacher, so the rest watches a movie for an hour. Educational movies of course: Police Academy II, etc.)
- Special Education (originally meant for students with learning difficulties and physical challenges, but since all students in Special Ed get their school diploma, even if they don’t pass the TAAS test, as many students as possible are placed in Special Ed, to increase the number of high school graduates each year. Students who mouth off to a teacher are put in Special Ed. If I were a teenager in this school, I would have been in Special Ed.)
The students choose a combination of classes. Each class is taught every day. So if you have Band, you have band every first period of school, and you’re late for every second period. With sports it’s the same thing. Some students are in Band and a sport. Band and track and field are all year long. The football season is from August to December. Basketball is from January to May. Volleyball I don’t know. It’s for girls only, so it doesn’t get much attention. The school begins with the football season.
(From a letter in 1996)
The next post in this series is about the high school sports: football and basketball.
Resident Alien -- Being Dutch in America 