In many schools, besides compulsory subjects, students have elective subjects as well. Electives are subjects that aren’t compulsory. Usually, you have a choice which electives you want to take or if you want to take them at all. These classes help students reveal their skills that they might not be able to show in other subjects. The electives also help students explore their interests in a variety of topics and help them find the path they want to take.
In GZAAT, electives are unfortunately only for seniors. Seniors choose two elective subjects that they have to take. These two subjects substitute History and Russian since they already have enough credit for those subjects and don’t need to study them anymore. Seniors have choices like philosophy, brain abilities and neuroscience, astrophysics, Italian, etc. Most of them are pretty complex subjects that are graded and, thus the freshmen, sophomores, and juniors would find them difficult to participate in. Seniors still have these subjects on Zoom without any difficulties, while other students besides seniors have three elective subjects; drama, art, and choir which can’t be held because of COVID-19. Having these classes on Zoom would be very unsuccessful and conducting them at school would be too dangerous because of the virus.
As Archil Makashvili, our physics teacher, mentioned in his interview, for him it would be very interesting if our school came up with elective subjects for other classes apart from the seniors. On the other hand, he said that it would be very difficult to organize. Since lower classes don’t have enough credit for some subjects they won’t be able to replace those subjects with electives. The school would have to add extra working hours for students to be able to take those elective courses and most students wouldn’t want to spend time on that after school. Gathering information from my classmates, most of them would want to have the possibility to choose elective subjects, but not all would necessarily want to take those courses. In my opinion, it isn’t fair that only seniors have electives and other classes should be allowed to choose some applicable elective subjects as well.
Overall, using the gathered information from interviews, some students and teachers in GZAAT agree that elective subjects should be for the entire high school and not only for the seniors. Although this will be challenging, we should at least try.
Edited by: Mariam Khaduri
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