New courses are not a rare occurrence at Minnehaha. The school is always looking for new and creative ways to create opportunities for students. Creating new courses is one of the many ways they do this.
Last year, Greek was added to the course catalog. It was taught by Latin teacher Johanna Beck, who has been trying to teach Greek at the high school for over 20 years.
“I have tried off and on to teach Greek here since I started 2;2 years ago,” said Beck.
She experienced many difficulties when trying to get the class approved; one of the main problems was finding a good place for it in the students and her schedule.
“It just proved to be pretty difficult to get [Greek] to work within the schedule without taking students out of other electives,” Beck said.
Last year Beck was able to get the Greek course approved by then school principal Mike DiNardo because of support from him and other students.
“The things that lined up a year and a half ago in order to actually get it on the books were, number one, that Dr. DiNardo, who was a principal at the time, was super supportive,” said Beck. “Number two, I had students who, because of some other weird scheduling things, had finished all of the Latin that we could offer them.”
Beck isn’t teaching Greek this year but hopes to offer the course again in the near future.
“I’m hoping to [teach Greek] either next year or the year after,” said Beck.
Beck believes that the class was a great success, and a big part of that was because of the students.
“I would call it a success,” Beck said. “They were all really motivated, hard working language students.”
Creating a new course is not always a 20 year process however, Assistant Principal Blake Mayes, one of the members of the administrative team that helps to oversee the process said that it often only takes one school year to go through the process.
“It doesn’t have to take very long, but probably from the beginning to the end, probably about a school year,” said Mayes.
The process of creating a new course involves many steps. First if a teacher wishes to make a new class they have to bring the idea to their department, the department then decides if the class is a good fit for their department.
The teacher then brings their idea to the administrative team who will then check to see if it makes sense for the school as a whole.
The administrative team also helps decide how often to offer the class, and sometimes they have to get creative with scheduling because of how full Minnehaha Academy’s schedule is.
“So me being new in my role as the assistant principal, I want to get a lot more creative about how we offer classes, maybe not what we offer, but how we offer them,” said Mayes.
One way Mayes proposes this can be done is by having a one semester class having multiple slots in the same semester instead of one slot in two different semesters.
“Instead of having a class first period first semester and second period second semester, you would move it to where it’s like first period second semester and six period second semester,” said Mayes. “Because that actually will probably make more options for students.”