By: Valeria Rojas
I’ve been honor classes since elementary school. Sounds crazy but it’s true, sorta. I’ve always scored higher than everyone in my class when it came to ELA so my teachers would send me and a few other students to a classroom and we would read books that are way above our grade level and learning how to annotate and how to write an essay. I know I’m “so cool”. Mind you I attended a school where my town didn’t really care about grades until the Star Testing came around because the higher the test scores, the more money the school gets. I don’t even remember having a local library until they built one years later. In middle school, I was put into honors English. While everyone was reading The Outsiders, I was reading Anne Frank’s Diary and writing so many essays. Now entering high school, I continued to do honors english up till my junior year. My counselor put me in AP English class, but to be honest I didn’t want to. It wasn’t because of the summer reading or the homework but it was because I simply didn’t want to do any AP classes. Personally, I felt that I didn’t need it. It sounds narcissistic but I personally felt that I know how to read, write, and comprehend materiel at an intellectual level. Yes, I could just take the class and be surrounded by students who are considered intellectual but I wanted to be in a class where I can have fun and be stress free. You can say I’m lazy, but I want to be in a class where I’m not constantly worried about what my essay is supposed to look like or how much homework I have to turn in everyday while juggling my other classes.
ERWC is seen as the dumb class or a class for seniors who are lazy to do any of the AP classes or take the COS class. I actually signed up for the COS class but I didn’t get a spot to be in the class. When I walk into my ERWC class, my wonderful teacher, Mrs. Audino greets everyone and while she is discussing what we are going to learn today, we are filling out our calendars and then we discuss what our day has been so far. Then we do a quick write about the topic we will be discussing that day and it relates to our unit. Since ERWC is more laid back, students don’t walk into class stressing about work because the class work is fairly easy and most of the homework we are assigned is classwork we didn’t finish in class. Plus, we have maybe less than a month to get every piece of homework/classwork to be completed before turning it in as a packet along with our essay/project we do for the unit. There is no excuse to have none of your work completed. The homework is easy, but that’s not my point here. What makes ERWC a great place to be in is because it is a fun class to be a part of. We discuss the materiel very thoroughly and luckley my classmates like to engage in the discussions. In class we read two books so far and I liked each book because we didn’t read a chapter and then take a quiz to see if you read it. Instead, we read our chapters, then discussed what we read so far. If you didn’t read the chapters, you have time to catch up or if you read the chapters and you didn’t understand what the hell was going on, you’re in luck because we’re going to talk about it. In my opinion, ERWC is less work to stress about and it’s more about engaging in the materiel. Since I do all my work in class, I can focus on my other class work. It’s less stress for me. If you like a more laid back class, discussing the materiel, actually liking what you learn and having less stress then ERWC is for you.