New Classes

A variety of new classes are being offered this school year at MC. These never- been- offered- before classes are Design and Mixed Media, Cabinet Making, Art Appreciation, and AP Computer Science.

Design and Mixed Media covers two-dimensional and three-dimensional art, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, and mixed media.

Cabinet Making offers training in finish carpentry and cabinetmaking, and the students learn from demonstrations and hands-on experiences.

One of these new classes, Art Appreciation, is taught by Alison Talle, who is also currently the AP Art History teacher. This class differs from AP Art History because it covers the basic foundations of art and different forms of mediums, which include ceramics, drawing, painting, photography, and Photoshop.

As no one at MC has taught Art Appreciation before, Talle is faced with some obstacles.

“Basically, you’re making the entire curriculum for it”, Talle said. “There are no lessons, and I don’t have a textbook, so I’m designing everything myself pretty much.”

Despite the challenges, Talle is looking forward to teaching Art Appreciation this year.

“I like to learn new things and to challenge myself in different ways.” Talle said. “For my students, I’d love for kids who have never been in art, who are kind of afraid of art, to then [think] I can do this, or that painting is really interesting, or the computer and Photoshop are really cool. We wanted to make a foundation class as a good stepping stone into all the other art classes and definitely into Art History as well.”

Talle recommends this class to all students at MC.

“It’s a great class for kids who’ve never taken art before at any level, [and] for kids who already have taken art, but want to see what other areas in art might be interesting,” Talle said. “Any kind of student would benefit from taking this class.”

Another new class, AP Computer Science, teaches programming, algorithms, and data structures. Currently, the class is starting off with simple coding programs and Java, doing projects such as drawing a house. However, this class will be getting more difficult, as explained by Senior Jenny Li.

“The class is pretty challenging because every step of the way you’re learning something new and you have to be constantly solving problems,” Li said.

Senior Kyla Broderick believes that this course can be beneficial to many students.

“[Computer science] is a really important skill to have in the workforce after high school,” Broderick said. “To be fluent in the language, or as fluent as we can get [is important].”

This course is also directly impacting Li’s plans for the future.

“I personally want to go into computer engineering and computer science as a major in college,” Li said. “I figured this would be a really good preparation for that.”

These four new classes cater to a variety of interests, from coding to art to carpentry, and offer students the opportunity to explore more interests.