With semester two setting in, most students, if not all of them, have a new schedule to adjust to. .
Each semester, students change some of their classes for various reasons, whether it be related to health, family, or future academics.
“We create the schedules, and then oftentimes, kids may change their mind on what they want or their goals have changed,” said Heather Williams, Big Sky’s Class of 2026 counselor. “Maybe they want to go for a scholarship and they realize they need another social studies to qualify for the scholarship or something like that happens, and so they need to change their schedule, or maybe they have a medical problem and they need the mornings free for doctors appointments and they need to move their schedule for that.”
But while most students request schedule changes for personal advancement, others request changes for personal interests.
“We also have kids who are like ‘I don’t like that teacher’, ‘I just want to be in my friend’s class’ ‘I don’t want a class at the beginning of the day because I want to sleep in,’” Williams explained. “Those are NOT legitimate reasons to change your schedule.”
The occurrence of the latter appears to be more common in the office of Michelle Riddle, the Class of 2028’s counselor, from her perspective.
“I think a lot of that is motivated by students maybe not wanting to continue with a hard class, wanting to change it because of their peers, wanting to drop a hard class because they want an easier one, wanting to move things around because they don’t like a teacher,” Riddle said.
There are, however, exceptions, as Williams states, “Of course, there could be extenuating circumstances like a death in the family or a medical crisis, we’ll always make exceptions if it’s warranted.”
But the freshmen class may be different in that regard. According to Class of 2029 counselor Leslie Guerreri, out of the 275 students she oversees, roughly 25 freshmen entered schedule change requests at the start of semester two.
“Yearlong classes are yearlong classes, we don’t just let students decide to do it, there’s a process to do it because you signed up for a yearlong class, so we want you to stay in that yearlong class,” said Guerreri, explaining the process. “So it’s an exception to that rule if you move out of a yearlong class.”
Students will also get an “F” on their transcript for any class they drop out of.
The sophomore class had a higher number, a more exact average of 112 out of 280 students wanting to switch around classes for the next semester, which is about 40% of students, according to Riddle.
“Freshmen generally don’t know the systems in the same way, and so they might at the end of the year want to change their schedule for the next year a little bit more, and some of these changes I felt like were really appropriate,” Riddle commented.
At the start of any new semester, students may experience hardships with things like adjusting to new classes or being surrounded by new and unfamiliar people. But maybe they’ll also end up liking those new classes and even gain a few new friends out of it. All of the counselors have a slightly different viewpoint on schedule changes, however they also have some of the same general visions for the years moving forward.
“I think I would like students to transition from avoiding difficulty and discomfort to starting to embrace that we want to build resiliency and have a tolerance for friction,” Williams said.
“We want students to learn that not everything in life is rainbows and butterflies and the way that we want it. We don’t always get all the classes that we want and all the teachers that we want with the friends that we want all day long, and to be able to persevere through that, deal with that discomfort, and rise to the challenge rather than always tapping out.”
Guerreri expressed similar thoughts.
“You’re not gonna love every class you take in high school, just like you’re not gonna love every job that you have, or responsibility that you have, and when we sign up for a class that’s a yearlong class, the expectation is that you take a whole year of it even if you don’t like it, even if you aren’t very fond of the teacher or maybe some students that are in it,” Guerreri said.
“We really want you to stick it out because you can still learn in the class and it really actually teaches you to get through things that are uncomfortable or that you don’t like very much, that’s a lesson that should be learned in high school because it’s an important thing to learn.”
Riddle echoed both Guerreri and Williams’ sentiments.
“I think that it is not at the fault of students, but I think that our world has made convenience the norm, and in reality, convenience is not the norm. There will be struggles, and some of those struggles look really severe and significant, like you’re really struggling with class or struggling with content, and I think some students really feel like the struggles are happening because they don’t have any friends in a class,” Riddle said.
“But I think what’s really important is to build resilience and to work through hard things, because that’s how you build resilience and adaptability. I think that those are really valuable and things we need to develop.”
