New Trier’s vast array of elective courses gives students both an opportunity to become more educated, and to explore their specific interests.
Electives are provided under many different categories, including English, science, speech/theatre, business education, family & consumer sciences, tech education, and art.
According to a study done on October 3rd, of the 4,036 New Trier students, 1,599 are involved in either Speech/Theatre, Tech Ed, or art classes. That’s almost 40%.
The department with the most students is the art department with 773. Many of these students are taking part in the glass art course, taught and introduced to the curriculum by Monique Boyd.
“I was teaching painting & drawing and a student came in with a torch, and wanted to start a club making beads,” said Boyd. “We started doing an art club, and then that club became really popular, so I decided to propose a class. I started teaching myself how to do different types of glass. The class was approved by the school board. The first year, there were three sections. The second year, there were five, and now there’s a waiting list to get in.”
Jake Witz, a junior who is involved with the glass art program, said that many students are drawn to glass art because “it’s different than a lot of the technical arts, in that a lot of students have never had experience with glass before.”
The art section also includes photography, sculpting, all music classes and more. Taking all of those classes into consideration, it seems natural that the art department would have the highest enrollment.
Matthew Ottaviano, Assistant Principal for Administrative Services at the Winnetka campus, says the art and theatre classes draw the most students because “you don’t have to play an instrument since early childhood to be involved. Not everybody is an actor. I think art is appealing because anyone can to try it out.”
Business education currently has the second-highest enrollment at 770 students, just three less than the art department. However, because one semester of business ed is required for graduation, it’s very likely that most of these students are choosing it for that purpose.
Of course, there are some courses that were very popular in past years that are now defunct. “We used to have a course in the tech arts department called aeronautics,” said Ottaviano. “That course completely evaporated and disappeared, because the teacher who taught it, who had a pilot’s license, no longer taught here.”
Ottaviano also commented on the waning popularity of photography: “My theory is that because it was no longer a requirement to take visual art classes, enrollment has dropped off significantly.”
When asked about the inclusion and inception of new courses that had not previously been provided, Ottaviano said that, “I think the elective departments are always trying to figure out what might be the next course in their offerings… Every year the theatre department is trying to think of some new ways to draw students in, and that’s the primary reason that they’re choosing to do new courses each year. Whether it’s theatre ensemble or whether it’s doing an improv-type class, they’ll throw those out there to see if they can get some enrollment from kids that are choosing theatre, and they either work or they don’t.”