By Reese Kovacas
While there has been much positive change this year at Irvington High School, there have also been some academic alterations that have affected certain aspects of student learning, such as the combining of language classes for students in AP Spanish/French and Spanish/French 5 Honors, as well as French III Honors and French III.
This combination, though mandatory to create comprehensive schedules, has proven to be a difficult implementation in the classroom for the French students.
Lillian Duke, a sophomore at IHS, said, “There’s too many people in the class and they need to distribute the people in classes better. It’s harder to get individual attention from the teacher and it makes speaking assessments more difficult and also just trying to learn with people of different levels is difficult.”
In French classes, the students, honors or no, are taught the same material at the same pace as the class functions as one. However, the non-honors students’ speaking and writing assessments are graded to a lesser standard which is the one main difference between the two.
“I think it’s fine for us as honors students,” said Greta Davis, a sophomore at IHS. “I think the bigger issue is that I don’t understand why those who are in non-honors have to do honors classwork even though they didn’t sign up for the course.
The French teacher, Madame Steuer, teaches three of these combined classes. She said, “The combined classes are a really tough challenge this year, especially because they have been implemented in the French program more so than in the Spanish program. When classes were separate, I was able to cater my teaching to the individual needs of my students better than I can now. The resulting larger class sizes, less individual attention, and combined proficiency targets have me wondering whether my students will be able to reach the same goals as in the past.”
Overall, the change has affected the classroom functionality and therefore the learning and understanding produced. Some believe that it is not helpful for either honors students or non-honors students as it affects efficiency and the ability to learn the skills and material needed for specific levels of French.
