Being a Garfield student requires a certain amount of ridiculous ego and conversational skill. That is, when someone asks how our school’s football team is doing, we have to be brazen enough to completely change the subject and start bragging about something GHS is actually good at, such as chess, or jazz band. (Note: at publication time this insult to our football team is no longer accurate. I think.) Some people like to boast about the school’s academics as well, citing the number of available AP classes, or the number of valedictorians who graduate every year, especially when they are talking to uppity Eastsiders. Unfortunately, not only is this smugness totally dorky (Valedictorians? Really?), it’s completely washing over a serious problem in the Garfield academic system.

Yes, the school has some very well-taught and educational classes at the highest academic levels, such as Physics, Statistics, and AP Language Arts. However, students who opt to take honors classes when an AP is available do not always find themselves receiving a quality education. Honors should be a label that means something: more rigorous than regular, but less so than AP. No student, much less a student who has elected to take a more difficult course in a subject, should be subjected to such poorly organized curricula as have been reported by some junior and senior honors students. Remember when you learned about homonyms years ago? Their versus there, too versus to? Last year, one junior honors Language Arts class devoted two weeks to filling out worksheets designed to help ESL students learn the difference between these homophonic words. This was after the class spent a week doing logic puzzles where you try to figure out which guy is the doctor based on a set of clues.

Students should not have to take the hardest classes in every subject just to get an acceptable education. AP students are not the only students that matter, and the school should make hiring choices that acknowledge that fact, rather than sticking lower level classes with unqualified teachers. This problem is seen most blatantly in Language Arts and history classes, where teachers seem not to know what to teach if they aren’t preparing students for a specific AP test. If a Garfield student didn’t like history, and didn’t feel up to an AP U.S. class, he or she would be hard-pressed to find a decent course in the subject, seeing as one U.S. honors class didn’t get past the Civil War last year. If my calculations are correct, that leaves approximately 144 years of American history that these students just didn’t learn. “Who cares about the twentieth century?” seems to be the attitude of this abbreviated curriculum.Moving at an almost remedial pace, the honors U.S. class did not live up to its label. As one Garfield student put it, “the difference between [honors and regular classes] is always indiscernible, and neither of them are any good.”

If the administration wants students to be in class badly enough that they give out Saturday school for being seconds late, they had better make sure that the classes are worth going to. A non-AP U.S. History class should be expected to get through the entirety of the country’s history; they just shouldn’t have to do it by May, when the AP tests come around. Language Arts classes should actually do grade-level work. Most importantly, Garfield should meet the educational needs of everybody, rather than focusing only on the AP programs. Students should not have to feel that because they are not advanced in a subject they are not entitled to learn it.

With well-qualified teachers and organized course plans, all of Garfield’s academics could soon become something to brag about. However, for that to happen, the powers that be would have to make smart hiring choices and stop forcing teachers to teach subjects that they are unprepared to teach. AP students are not the only students who want to learn, so it’s time to raise our school’s standards, rather than bringing them down again and again.