What We Could Teach

     Readers of this blog know that I don't think we teach the right things in the American high school in the understandable quest to give every single student the opportunity to go on to a good university.
     I've explained before that I think we subtly and sometimes overtly push every kid to fill up his or her schedule with too many math and language courses, preventing them from exploring other subjects that might do them more good.
    I'll fess up right here that my own ideas have their own inherent problems.
    To get into the UC system you need those courses that I would like to de-emphasize. What happens to the child who realizes too late that they should have prepared for the university? (My answer:  go to a junior college and take what you need.)
    Won't my classes (which I'll talk about below) become dumping grounds? And won't the general academic ambience of the school suffer if we have lots of non-college bound classes? (My answer:  yes and yes, if we let that happen. Only if the faculty really embraced my ideas would we be able to avoid these problems.)
     And how do you offer new kinds of classes when you know only a handful of students will sign up for them at first, and that many will never gain enough traction to justify hiring a teacher to do the instruction? (My answer:  many of my proposed classes could be taught by current staff. Those that didn't attract a following would be dropped. Some of my classes won't happen simply because no part time teacher would agree to take the job.)
     I'll also stipulate that badly behaved kids can destroy any class. The theory here is that if students are in a class that they care about, disruptive behavior will be moderated by the students themselves.
    Here are some ideas. I bet you have some of your own. Most of these courses would be only for juniors and seniors.
     Career Tech: 
     Life Skills. You can't call it Home Ec, boys won't enroll.
     Nursing. Has anyone noticed the big building going up on 880?
     Driver's Ed. Yes, I know there are almost insuperable insurance obstacles, but darn it, can't we find a way to do this?
     Science:
     Gardening. I once taught Landscaping to train kids to get a job. Those jobs are gone to hard working immigrants. But there's room for students to learn how to design and build gardens.
     Astronomy.
     Nutrition.
     Math:
     Programming, Coding. Instead of the drudgery of math operations, teach them to program a computer to solve those problems. This is where logical thinking (not the foolishness of 'critical thinking') would be learned.
     Personal finance. Tough to teach rigorously but it can be done.
     Flash animation, game design, et. al. There are many advanced computer classes we could offer.
     Social Science:
     Public Speaking. Of obvious benefit.
     Current Events.
     Art:
     Interior Design. They might live in a home some day.
     Fashion.
     Cosmetology. There'd be no problem filling sections of this.
     Music:
     I'm really out of my element here but can't we teach them to play some sort of simple musical instrument? They do it in elementary school to prep them for bigger things, but couldn't we do something like this in high school?    
     Language:
     Am I contradicting myself by proposing more language? I simply want them to be able to abandon language as juniors and seniors if it doesn't suit them. So I'll add Mandarin here (even though I know the principal has already tried to add this but the practical obstacles were too daunting).
    Those are my ideas. Some, I know, are impractical....now.