Have you heard that the math and science departments are making their classes harder this school year? That is probably alarming for many of you, and I’ve personally heard peers panicking about it. To get clarification for our student body, I conducted an interview with Dr. Trussell to get a clear idea of how and why our science classes are changing.
Dr. Trussell first made it clear that the classes are not getting harder; they are being brought back to the pre-covid standards. Giving insight to how the Upper School culture was pre-pandemic, Dr. Trussell states, “no one turned in work late, it was taboo”, and that in comparison to the newly implemented grace period demonstrates how Breck has changed in response to the pandemic.
To accommodate for the challenges that distance learning brought, the content across all departments was reduced, and the Science Department is bouncing back from that slump. This is not a new development; they have been ramping up the amount and complexity of the material and work over the past 3 school years since we all returned to in-person learning. On behalf of the Science Department, Dr. Trussell believes that as of this year, the complexity of the science curriculum matches that of pre-COVID, but that doesn’t mean the experience matches it. When asked why it took so long to bounce back, Dr. Trussell explained that pandemic conditions did not allow students to develop their academic skills to the level necessary to succeed in the pre-COVID curriculum. Because of this, the faculty was challenged with not only catching students up on content, but also helping students develop a stronger set of skills.
Another problem that the Science Department encountered was how students struggled with the transition from the pandemic back to normal life. During the pandemic, everyone had an abundance of extra time that they spent doing whatever they pleased, yet post pandemic, everyone was thrust into the unfamiliar territory of balancing school alongside everything else. Because of this, the Science Department couldn’t make their coursework harder when students were struggling with the reduced coursework.
