The new semester schedule raises many questions for the coming years and concerns. One includes whether FIT will continue for future freshmen. The semester schedule brings up many problems and has been hit with much negative feedback from students attending Granada. With this new schedule, the school year will be split into two semesters, instead of three trimesters like we have now. This gives fewer slots for students to pick classes and makes classes last over 4 and a half months, as opposed to 3 months.
This is where FIT comes into play. The purpose of this class is to prepare and teach freshmen about Granada. FIT teachers do this by giving them a tour of the campus, introducing them to teachers, and playing FIT Trivia on Fridays. With the trimester schedule, this is ideal, as freshmen would get the first third of the year to learn about and integrate into Granada, and by the end of those months, they should be knowledgeable about the school. However, with the new incoming semester schedule, freshmen would have to attend FIT for half the school year, and by then, they would probably already feel familiar with the school. There might not even be enough to teach the new freshmen about Granada for an extra four and a half months. Ninth grader Anjali Prasad said, “It’s a waste of way too much time to have FIT go on for that long, and there’s not even enough content to go on for that long.”
Another problem with the new semester schedule and FIT is the amount of classes you can take per year. Since the number of classes you will be able to take will be reduced, there are some concerns as to whether FIT is really necessary, or if it will just take up space on an already limited schedule. One freshman said, “I hope FIT stays because it was really fun and really useful, but, like, I don’t know if they’d even be able to fit it in and then have enough space for classes.”
There are also other factors involved with a new, smaller, selection of classes next year, like sports. The same freshman also pointed out, “As a sports player, they keep saying ‘don’t fill up your classes if you play sports so you don’t have to miss class’, but, like, I want to take all of those classes.” If any freshmen are interested in participating in sports, they may be encouraged to take less, even if they don’t want to. With the idea of FIT staying around, this might reduce the options for students even more.
The question of how important FIT is also comes into play. With the idea of getting rid of the class altogether, one must truly think of how beneficial it is for new freshmen at Granada. One freshmans’ take on it was “I mean, it was kind of important. You get to learn some stuff that’s useful later on.” On one hand, there are many benefits to FIT, such as campus tours, informative presentations about education opportunities, and teaching kids about important life lessons. But do we really need a whole class for these things, especially since we will be elongating classes by an extra month and a half? Prasad said, “I think the only good thing about FIT was the presentations when they had, like, speakers come in. I think that was the only really valuable part of FIT, so if we could just have those and not have an entire class wasted on it, that would be nice.”
There is still a question about how well freshmen will adjust to high school without FIT, though, for a handful of people. When an anonymous ninth grader was asked this, she said, “I feel like [freshmen] would have no idea what’s going on.”
There are some pros and cons that come with FIT, but do the pros get weighed down by the cons when presented with the new semester schedule? It seems like some parts of this course are more important than others, but are they important enough to warrant a class that takes up half the year? In the end, the idea of whether FIT will stay at Granada or not seems to differ from person to person, and it all just depends on what Granada thinks is best for their new incoming freshmen.
