Camas High School (CHS) broadens educational perspectives as it introduces several new courses to its curriculum. A few of the classes including Health Occupations, Functions and Reasoning and Holocaust and Genocide Studies aim to open new learning opportunities for students at CHS that they previously did not have.
A number of these classes have previously been taught at CHS but were recently brought back.
Kristine Straw will teach Health Occupations, one of many new classes to be offered next year. The class covers information relevant to several different medical fields to provide opportunities to students who hope to pursue medical field careers in the future. Straw has previously taught this class but wanted to bring it to CHS.
“It’s a great opportunity for students to get a basic understanding of the healthcare field, understand the different elements of it and get some hands-on experience with professionals who are actually working in the field themselves,” Straw said.
The class grants a Career and Technical Education credit and will take one semester. Students will learn about different medical fields including physical therapy, orthodontics, nursing and radiology. Additionally, Straw hopes to see Health Occupations B being provided to connect with senior projects eventually.
Another class to be taught at CHS is the Holocaust and Genocide Studies class taught by World History teacher Jeanne Jarvis. The class will take one semester and provide a social studies elective credit and is open to all juniors and seniors.
This class covers the ten stages of genocide and the Holocaust. The Holocaust lesson will be approximately nine weeks, while the genocide portion of the curriculum will be taught in the remaining weeks of the semester.
Jarvis hopes to bring in multiple guest speakers to expand the learning opportunities provided in the class. Additionally, the class will have some project-based learning in small groups.
For the class to be approved, Jarvis had to propose the idea to administrators, and then be cleared by the school board.
As for mathematics, a new class taught by Kathryn Boring has been added. The class is called Functions and Reasoning and has replaced the seniors-specific math class, College Algebra Prep.
“It’s really to lay a strong foundation of algebra if kids might have struggled a little bit in Algebra 2 and aren’t quite ready for precalculus,” Boring said.
The mathematics department felt as though there were not enough math opportunities for students in senior year, as colleges like to see the four years of math in high school.
Due to classes being removed from the CHS curriculum, new classes are being implemented. There have been different opinions on whether or not these classes should be taken out. Although, refreshing the curriculum is always a great change to the classic courses students see each year during forecasting.
