By: Kirk Tran
When summer begins, many young scholars at MHS tend to completely liberate themselves from the prison known as high school and spend those precious months fooling around. There are, however, many students who decide that attending school over the summer–and not remedial school, mind you–is entirely worth it. Their seemingly masochistic train of thought is not incorrect; in fact, attending summer classes is worth it for a myriad of reasons.
It really is no great secret that several departments at MHS have lackluster teaching staff. In some cases, getting a mediocre teacher versus getting an abominable one can be like a game of Russian roulette. Gambling is unhealthy, so the only way to win is not to play; in such cases, the optimal move is to bypass taking such classes at MHS in the first place and instead take them at community college.
Another reason to take community college classes is to open up spaces in one’s schedule. One could pick and choose between their most preferred classes or they could take all of them anyway by going to a community college. Want to fit more math classes in your schedule but icky-sticky English gets in the way? Well, that’s a class one can take at a community college rather than MHS.
Taking summer classes is also a great way to review for next year’s classes. Nobody wants to barely eke out an A- for Honors Pre-Calculus and then forget it all by the time next year’s Calculus BC class rolls around.
Speaking of math, advancing a level in math is yet another reason to attend community college. If one’s currently assigned math class is too easy, it is even easier to sign up for and score well on a summer class to move up a level.
Of course, it’s fairly easy to forget that learning can be fun in of itself. If one is interested in classes other than the stereotypical math, science, English, or history class, it is also fairly simple to take other non-related and non-core classes.
To cap it all off, there really is no downside to taking summer classes, other than perhaps transportation. Students concurrently enrolled in high school are usually given free admission to community colleges, such as Santa Clara’s Mission College.
