It’s been almost two years since Wilsonville High School introduced “Life Class” to its students. Behind the somewhat confusing name, it is a subject with many goals.
One of them is to try to teach teens how to live complex adult lives. It tackles difficult, but important topics like how to pay taxes and teaches students the importance of insurance.
However, the most important purpose for Life Class is to provide students with free space between classes to relax and catch up on missing work, which is why the second half of the class is always given over to students to use as they need.
A few times a month, Life Class transforms into flex period, a study hall where students can choose the class in which they want to study. This is a timeframe for students to get help from teachers, as well as an opportunity to retake tests and make up work.
It may seem like a very convenient system for everyone, but nevertheless, some students have expressed their dissatisfaction with Life Class, arguing endlessly about its usefulness. So, what’s wrong with Life Class?
As a WVHS student myself, I can’t be unbiased here. I don’t like Life Class. My dislike for this stems from frustration.
Every WVHS student has to take Life Class for the whole four years. It’s mandatory. As a senior student, I’m losing so many potential classes that I could have taken. Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a big problem, if the Life Class curriculum wasn’t so boring and incoherent.
“I don’t really like the activities we do in the first half of class,” shares freshman Robbie Osborn. “I don’t think we should have an assignment every class. Not because the assignments are necessarily hard, but because they’re hardly necessary.”
Life Class assignments are problematic. All of the students I spoke with unanimously expressed their dislike of them.
Assignments are designed to prepare students for adulthood. Topics discussed include insurance, credit, self-sufficiency, etc. That is, they are themes that in theory can be explained by parents. They do not require a specially trained teacher or textbook. They’re not inherently difficult to explain.
One of the seniors, Grape Haack, expressed her outrage.
“It’s difficult when you’re forced to do activities that you already know about and activities that don’t make any sense and are useless,” she says. “We are not going to retain this knowledge at all.”
Grape Haack also shared how she doesn’t like how Life Class enforces group activities.
In addition to the goals mentioned earlier, Life class has another one — community building. Almost every assignment involves group work. And things might not seem so bad if it weren’t for one thing: teens don’t like to socialize with other teens. Especially if that socializing is forced upon them.
Moreover, sometimes the assignments involve frank communication about yourself, which is uncomfortable in itself, and here you have to share it with people you don’t know. Who will also be forced to share something personal.
From what I’ve said, it may seem like Life Class is something awful, but the twist is that all can agree on how useful study hall and flex period are.
This great advantage covers all the disadvantages. It is really very helpful and comfortable. As a lazy senior, I would have had a significantly harder time in school without it. Ironically, part of this article was written during study hall.
So, do we need Life Class? Sure, its study hall and flex period are insanely useful and it’s hard without them. But do we need assignments and imposed group activities? Do we need to make it mandatory? Personally, I think not.
