Odds are, at some point, before high school, you consumed some kind of media that had something to do with high school. Think of “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” “Jujutsu Kaisen,” and “Stranger Things.” All of these show high school… in some capacity. These stories shape our expectations for high school, and some of these expectations are inaccurate, depending on what school you go to.
One class that seems like a staple in high school, to non-high school students, is home economics, or some other culinary/food-based class. We don’t have any classes like that here, but we used to.When WHS was Rogers HIgh School, some teachers remember a great culinary program. “Once a month they would open a restaurant in the Home Ec room and they would have the staff could go, and some students… It was called the Golden Hawk Café,” Mr. Cornell commented. “They would serve really good lasagna and rolls and the students would make the lasagna, make the rolls and they would also be the waiters, waitresses, busboys.”
Sometimes a class could get broken up into multiple other classes, like what happened to the Humanities class. “The religion stuff isnow covered in World History,” Mr. Mulvihill remarked, “and then the Art Appreciation covers the art history section of it”
Another class that is typically portrayed as being extremely common is woodshop. We don’t have one of those either, but maybe we should. “Currently, carpenters are getting older and they’re starting to retire and there’s not a lot of young people coming up that have those skills,” said Mr. Cornell.
Some of these classes may seem… not very useful outside of that specific class, but this one would help with most of our classes. “We used to have this class called Applied Writing. It was a writing class for writing essays, not creative writing,” Mr. Mulvihill stated.
The last class I’m going to talk about is a bit of an oddball. I don’t think anyone would’ve expected it coming into high school, but it does seem like it would’ve been fun. “I remember a class where they actually, students, would help to build a house,” Mr. Cornell said.