“I’m sorry, you can’t change your schedule just because of your teacher. It’s unfair to other students,” your counselor says. You’re left sitting in disbelief. Unfair to other students? It’s unfair to me. Not being able to choose my own teachers for my own schedule is leaving my future up to a teacher who I can’t learn from. Of course, you don’t say this because that would be disrespectful. “Thanks for trying,” you say instead as you walk out of the office.
The inability for students to have a say in who their teachers are, puts them with certain teaching styles and methods that don’t necessarily agree with their way of learning. “Different students have different ways of learning and the teacher you have may or may not teach the way you learn,” junior Kayla Forsythe said.
Teachers affect grades, that’s no argument. The variety of views on Powerpoints, homework and grade rounding presents students of the same class with non-uniform grading. “Having a choice as to which teacher you have is a good thing because some people learn very differently and have other needs and require a little bit of extra help and not all teachers give that help or pay attention to it,” junior Leah Mietus said.
The Emotion Revolution survey conducted by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and the Born This Way Foundation gathered data from 22,000 students. According to the survey, students were bored 70 percent of the time in school. The lack of engagement by teachers definitely impacts the engagement of students and as a result, how well they perform in the class. Students should be able to choose teachers they don’t find boring.
Other students and faculty believe that if were able to select our teachers, people would take advantage of this and use this power when unnecessary. “Being able to choose our teachers wouldn’t be beneficial. I think a lot of the time people don’t like their teachers despite the fact that they’re good teachers,” senior Sophia Morakis said.
Despite the possibility to improve their own schedule, some students question why change something that’s not broken. “If we had the ability to change our teachers some teachers will be overloaded. Students may not make the best decision by choosing a chill teacher that doesn’t give a lot of work instead of choosing a teacher that will challenge them,” junior Eddie Richardson said.
Others argue that college won’t allow you to choose who teaches you, therefore high school shouldn’t allow it either. This may be true but in colleges such as the Ivy Leagues, students are allotted “shopping weeks” where they sample classes and make their schedule selection based off their interest of the class topic and their agreeability with the teacher’s methodology.
Overall, people feel that they should have control of their schedule because it’s their lives. Sophomore Michael Auth said the counselors’ excessive control over schedules is “tyrannical.”
Chloe Perel
News Editor
