At a school so intense and rigorous, everyone is focused on their grades. How many B’s end up on our report card, how high our test grades are, what our GPAs are.
Looking past our grades, we commonly ask ourselves the question, “When am I going to use this in the real world?”
As a senior, I’ve taken a huge variety of classes over my years at Staples. These are classes that poked my brain and still sit with me today.
Human Rights
This class both informs you and encourages deep discussion. While learning about fundamental human rights and the protections we have around them, you also get to dive into your own subtopics. Over the course of a semester, you learn about commonly unknown world occurrences that aren’t always in our history curriculum. After learning about these, you can dive into your own research and explore topics around the world that you’re interested in. I took away a lot of information from this class, and felt engaged in the news while keeping myself informed.
Advanced Painting
Any art class at Staples is so valuable. Taking advanced painting taught me that I need to take time in my day to slow down. Putting my wired headphones in and spending an hour of my day mixing paints and creating something I love has been critical to my sanity during the school day. While learning the strategies to painting, I also learned the importance of escaping from any lingering anxieties and worries. I’ve been able to apply this to other sections of my life through recognizing the need to slow down.
Personal Finance
As a now required class, this is definitely worth it. As high schoolers, most of us have summer- or year-round jobs. Learning how to take care of our money to ensure we are using it to our highest potential is extremely helpful. This class taught me the importance of starting to care about your money at a young age, and how quickly things add up when you spend money on useless items. I definitely recommend this class to help students focus on and apply lessons to their own life scenarios.
Advanced Journalism
Although this is the class I’m writing this article for now, I have learned so many skills from working on a journalism team. In this class, you learn how to collaborate with others for one main goal: making the web and paper as engaging as possible. With the amount of collaborating in this class, you learn how to talk to anyone open to having an interview, how to be creative, how to discover your writing style and how to dive deeper into topics to get the most accurate and reliable information possible. I will surely take what I have learned from this class into the real world.
On top of these classes, don’t forget to take the classes that interest you. Exploring different subjects can open your mind to a whole new passion, even one that you might want to take further. Take advantage of the classes Staples offers!
