Conifer Senior High School students recently had registration for the 2024-2025 school year. During registration, students have the choice to pick their core classes, electives, languages, and whether or not they want to do regular, honors, or AP classes. For around five years, freshmen got the opportunity to go from the Spanish 1 course and skip Spanish 2 and go straight to Spanish 3 regular or honors.
“We stopped because of COVID. So it’s been an option for probably five years. I think that was the first class where I started skipping kids because the AP program has died due to middle school kids not taking a language before high school,” Spanish teacher, Jeremy Barnett, said.
In order to graduate students need to complete 2 semesters of a language course, but the majority of colleges will require three to four years of language. When students skip to Spanish 3 it allows them to be able to take AP Spanish Language and Culture their senior year. This allows the student to have college credit and to further their education in Spanish.
“A lot of colleges need you to have a language to be able to get in, and even though I don’t see myself using Spanish in a future job, I had a lot of fun in Spanish 1, so I think it will be good for me,” freshman, Sophie Kramer, said.
If students are interested in skipping they have to get permission from their parents as well as approval from their current Spanish teacher. After that, students will get added to a Google Classroom called “Skippin’ Spanish Two” with Spanish Teachers, Nicole Burris, and Jeremy Barnett.
“I’m going to be skipping Spanish 2 because I felt like Spanish 1 was pretty easy for me and I just really want to get another honors class in and also have something more to do over the summer. So over the summer, I’m going to be taking Spanish 2 online so I can get caught up. Then next year, I’m going to go right into Spanish 3,” freshman, Abigail Leidel, said.
In the Google Classroom students will have access to vocabulary lists and information on the classwork they are missing when they skip Spanish 2. Although the assignments aren’t required, Spanish teachers highly recommend learning the vocabulary so they aren’t behind in Spanish 3 normal or honors.
“There is a fair amount of assignments you can do, and the more you do the more prepared you are. If you are practicing the vocabulary, grammatically speaking the workload is around 10 hours, but it depends on how fast a student can pick up the vocabulary,” Barnett said. “Unfortunately, in the last year, some students didn’t do the work, so we are working on finding ways to motivate students after spring break.”
