“Now for the fun stuff,” said MCPS Board of Education Superintendent Thomas Taylor as he kicked off a discussion regarding the introduction of new, student-proposed classes for the 2025-26 school year.
The MCPS Board of Education approved three classes for the pilot process for the 2025-26 school year. Newly suggested and approved courses go into the “New Pilot Course” category, where staff are assigned and course materials are created, before moving onto the “Second Year Pilot” phase, when the course begins to be offered in select schools. “Hip-Hop Poetics and Rhetoric: Exploring the Golden Age of Hip Hop” was approved for the former category, while “Jewish Peoplehood Throughout History” and “Social Justice Through Public Policy” moved on to the latter.
“Hip-Hop Poetics and Rhetoric: Exploring the Golden Age of Hip Hop” will be offered at Montgomery Blair High School. While there is already a course that examines hip-hop culture through a sociological and historical light, the new course will reportedly examine hip-hop through a literary light and will go hand in hand with the existing course.
“Jewish Peoplehood Throughout History” will also be offered at Montgomery Blair High School, and, according to the Board of Education, “seeks to help all students understand the uniqueness of the Jewish experience in a way that will unpack the intersectional nature of the Jewish identity.”
“Social Justice Through Public Policy” will be offered at Walt Whitman High School. Its goal is to “empower students to understand and productively engage in the public social policy process” and to teach students “how to advocate for social policies to advance social justice.”
Whether these courses will eventually make their way into RM’s offerings remains up in the air. ”I am all for updating curriculum over time as new scholarships emerge and students’ interests change,” AP and IB Coordinator Joseph Jelen said, who is on the team that decides which courses RM will offer. Jelen called the process of course offerings a “delicate balance”- “departments have to consider who would be willing to teach the new course and if offering the new course might pull students from other electives the department offers.” However, it wouldn’t be RM’s first time working on a pilot course. In the spring of 2021, RM took on the task of creating the curriculum for the LGBTQ Studies course, which later became district-wide.
Sophomore Henry Yang shared his thoughts on the new courses. “These courses are certainly interesting, but they don’t interest me in particular,” he said. “I’m sure that they will appeal to a lot of students, though.”
These courses are special in that they are suggested by students, letting them have benefits that aren’t found in more standardized electives. “The simple addition of electives to the current selection of standardized ones are improvements to the school curriculum in of itself; students have more options to explore potential areas of study and uncover new passions,” Yang said. “Expanding the number of diverse courses to choose from promotes diverse interests in students, which can help students realize the pursuit of careers that may be outside the norm.”
RM offers the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program, along with the opportunity of all students to take IB classes as it fits with their schedules. “With so much dictated by state standards, electives offer a unique opportunity to help broaden curriculum offerings. As an IB world school, it is our mission to develop ‘inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help create a better and more peaceful world through education that builds intercultural understanding and respect,’” Mr. Jelen said. “Thus, to build intercultural understanding and respect, we must learn about cultures different from our own. Diverse course offerings help us approach this mission.”
