Calculus in High School? Increasingly rare to non-existent.
What we need is the opposite - a return to traditional curriculums, and stop non-sense like a 5 credit course in graphic novels (a thing in our district school).
That's an exaggeration. As of 2018, 65% of public schools in the US offer Calculus:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_225.72.a...
Calculus is irrelevant for the majority of students.
I don’t even really write anymore…
And it seems like if the child is creative and has zero plans to go into STEM then he shouldn't have his time wasted. Which is a win-win for everyone since disengaged students often disrupt the teacher and other students.
If we let things pass because (sometimes misinformed) person thought it was ridiculous, there wouldn't be a government at home and I, being female, might not have any rights whatsoever.
My school required six credits of some kind of art (music, visual arts, performing arts), and I can't think of any great reason this would be less worthy than any other kind of niche art class.
It is a consumption course. Kids don’t actually learn how to write graphic novels. That might actually might be worthwhile.
That's the norm for high school English courses.
Which is normal. We don't tend to teach high school students how to write entire novels. We aren't really doing creative work at the high school level either: Most papers are research papers or talking about themes of novels the entire class read. Hardly creative stuff.
English classes exist to help you process what others are communicating and to facilitate your communication with others. Most of this won't be creative endeavors, and the focus usually shys away from this stuff as kids get older. This is especially true with "advanced" and "AP" classes, which tend to model themselves after a more scholarly look at literature. There isn't much room for creativity there.
This doesn't make things a farce, but merely a different take than what you think you'd want for a fun class. IIRC, they offered a creative writing elective when I was in school. Anyone actually interested would take it, but in modern times, I'd guess students are more likely to get tips from places like NaNoWriMo - and all it takes if for a teacher to mention that once or twice for interested students to do it. For fun.
It is a consumption course. Kids don’t actually learn how to write literature. That might actually might be worthwhile.
The point is to read and be exposed to different sorts of literature. This is much easier to do this with material that students are actually interested in instead of 150-year-old romance novels. And as a bonus, the students are a bit more likely to understand the symbolism and references than they would in an old book - the older literature is honestly more suited for a class that hooks both history and literature in the same course.
Literature classes are consumption courses, too, and lead a few to develop a lifelong reading (and consumption) habit, btw. We definitely watched movies based on books: Part of my high school Lit class was doing a comparison between A Brave New World and Demolition Man. (We also had a 12-page senior paper, mine was on Kurt Vonnegut. But that's beside the point.)
And perhaps part of the issue is that you haven't really read a lot of graphic novels so you misunderstand the depth that they can have, especially if you get into more obscure titles.
I'd assume they were writing about the graphic novels. But I also assume they were discussing the themes in class and we took multiple choice tests about things we read. It wasn't always writing. In current times, this would especially be the case if the school system had an initiative to cut down on the sheer workload of homework. (Which I approve of, most teens don't need hours of homework on top of school)
What you don't learn to write are actual freaking novels, just like they aren't going to teach you how to illustrate and write a graphic novel in most high school classes. You write essays, research papers, and things like that. Not entire novels.
> Kids don't learn to write novels in literature class either - you've missed the point of such classes.
> Literature classes are consumption courses, too, and lead a few to develop a lifelong reading (and consumption) habit, btw.
Kids don't write full novels in those classes because the timeframes involved couldn't possibly permit it, but nevertheless half the time in those courses is dedicated to getting students to write short stories, poetry, (not merely essays!) At the highschool level the courses are about writing as much if not more than about consuming literature.