DeMatha’s 2022 Course Selection: A New Way to Choose

On February 3, 2022, DeMatha held its annual course selection assembly. Mr. William Clark, the assistant principal at DeMatha, led the Google Meet that the assembly took place in. The form that the course selection followed changed from prior years because of safety concerns over having large in-person assemblies due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic.

In this format of course selection, teachers and the heads of departments were able to give a synopsis of the courses that they are going to teach or that their departments are offering. This allowed students to have an in-depth understanding of what that course would look like.

This format differed from how DeMatha previously hosted course selection assemblies. Before this year, meetings would be held in the new and original gyms, where half the student body would attend in either location while teachers presenting their courses would do so at a podium in front of the students. The teachers, once done with their first presentation, would then have to go to the other half of the students to present their course again. The online format made it so that the teachers did not have to do their presentation twice allowing the process to be a little more efficient and easier than in years prior.

Although this new format had some positives, there were also a few negatives. Students were being asked to pay attention for a little more than an hour while having already been seated in that same classroom for an hour. Overall, this could have had a negative effect because some students may have lost attention to the presentations towards the end of the assembly.

Lastly, doing things online such as presenting will never feel the same as doing them in-person, with faces to look at and an audience to gauge. It felt like a little bit of that interactivity, however small it was already due to the size of the audiences, was almost completely lost in the online format. Teachers did not have faces to look at but instead looked at a camera and a screen.

English classes on Feb. 10 and Feb. 11 will be used for students to make their course selections based on the catalogue that was given to them and the presentations that they saw at the course assembly.

Different from a normal course selection, this format allowed students to really be focused on each individual course as they were presented. Still, some fatigue set in towards the end of the assembly, as is the case with a lot of online activities. A sense of simply being there and seeing faces in-person was lost without the full in-person assembly. Hopefully, as time goes on, DeMatha can go on to find the best way to present courses and give students the ability to make their best decisions while also making them excited for learning.