Senior Course Selection

SENIOR COURSE SELECTIONS

Seniors will have chances to take more elective courses than in their previous school years. Further, given the heavy load of AP courses for upper level students, study halls will be offered.

Download the Course Selection Form for Seniors
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• Elective choices for Seniors •

AP Literature and Composition
Senniors have the chance to continue their AP work in Language Arts with the course, AP Literature and Composition. Mrs. Patillo and Mr. Iliff have made recommendations as those who should consider taking the course, and those students have been registered. If a family is interested in the course, please contact the school administration and make known this request.

SENIOR HONORS THESIS
We have an additional elective opportunity for seniors: Senior Honors Thesis. This course will be a chance for a senior to explore a topic of their choosing, in greater depth, and then pursue a final project to pull that research together. For those interested in this opportunity, the following would need to occur. The student would identify a teacher here on campus with whom to consult initially, and write a brief statement of what he/she is interested in studying. For instance, a student, through her work in Deacon Gorman’s class may have been interested by the writings of St. Athanasius, or another student might have been interested in the recent developments in the quantum theory of the atom and the search for the Higgs Boson. After that consultation, the student and the teacher will do two things. They will develop a reading list on the subject that is both appropriate for the study and comprehensive. Secondly, the teacher and administration will help to identify resources outside the school. That resource will be someone in the field, whether a university professor or someone with credentials or experience. That outside person will be used as a resource to ask questions and a reader of the final project; their participation can be fairly limited in scope.

The student will use our faculty member as the primary point of contact throughout the semester. The student will produce two pieces of work. First, an annotated review of the reading list, which can be print, on-line, and other media. The creation of this set of documents will allow the student to focus on the final product: an approximately twenty-page final paper on a specific subject within the more generalized field of study. For instance, the student might compose a paper about St. Athanasius’ work in understanding the Trinity and Holy Spirit, or an explanation of why scientists are searching for the Higgs Boson and why that matters. Again, the outside reader and our faculty member will read the paper and advise.

The end result of this is a half credit, earned over the course of a semester’s worth of time. However, the work can stretch from the first semester into the second, if necessary. The work has to conclude by the end of the third quarter. The student, teacher, and outside reader will be responsible to assign a grade. The course will carry the highest GPA weighing (AP/Dual Credit level).

The Writings of John Paul II
We will be offering an elective course for Juniors and Seniors, based on the fiction and non-fiction of Pope John Paul II. Dr. Friesenhahn has taught seminar courses on Blessed John Paul, and is organizing a course around themes within the Pope’s writings, in both his encyclicals and his fiction (plays and poems). It will be an interesting and inspiring course. (The course will carry with it an Pre-AP course weighting.)

Studio Art III
We will also be offering an Art III course, for those interesting in continuing their work as a studio artist. That half credit class will be taught in the Spring of 2013.

Yearbook
Finally, during period 8, from 3-3:50 p.m., we will be formally registering students for a Yearbook Publishing course. It can be taken as both a half credit and full credit course. It can count as either a fine arts course, or an elective class.
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• CORE COURSES FOR SENIORS •

Theology IV

English IV **** OR **** AP Literature & Composition (American Literature focus)

AP U.S. History

Pre-Calculus (Student must be also enrolled in Physics I)
**** OR ****
AP Calculus AB (Student must be also enrolled in Earth and Space Science)

Earth and Space Science (Student must be also enrolled in AP Calculus)
**** OR ****
Physics I (Student must be also enrolled in Pre-Calculus)

PHYSICS I
Physics I is a new course within our curriculum. The course is a basic, conceptual Physic class, with Algebra as the highest math level needed for the course. Physics I will cover all of the curriculum standards within a high school Physics course. For those students in upper math track, in the Junior year, the Pre-AP Physics class covered the same curriculum standards in greater depth.

EARTH & SPACE SCIENCE
The second science course for seniors this year will be Earth and Space Science. This course will be a combination of a few of the proposed courses we had envisioned for our students initially (AP Environmental Science, Aquatic Science, and Astronomy), and will be a very interesting departure from the other courses taken so far. Essentially, the study of the course entails looking first at the Earth as a planet, and engaging in a study of planets, the solar system, and the universe. Then, the course turns inward and studies our planet, both as a solid planet and a planet of water.

The TEKS are the simplest starting point for understanding this course; as a practice, we use national standards (NSTA).
http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter112/ch112c.html#112.36

To better explain the decision to offer this course, for those students eligible to take the course (those who have taken Biology, Chemistry, and Physics), they will all be enrolled in three AP courses: AP Calculus, AP US History, and AP Literature. It is not possible or prudent for us to offer a fourth AP course for seniors. Mrs. Tobias will be the instructor, has taught this content before, and is excited to be able to start this course here at JPIICHS. She and I are excited about using our location here in the Hill Country as a ripe area for studying all three major strands (space, land, water).

PRE-CALCULUS
The fourth mathematics course is defined as a Pre-Calculus course, and will include the follow content: semester one will be a review of math topics within Pre-Calculus, essentially an Algebra III course, readying a student for College Algebra or Calculus class. Semester two will be topics in statistics. For the student in the Algebra-Geometry-Algebra II track, this will be the natural course selection.

For those on the AP Calculus track, we strongly encourage all to enroll in AP Calculus. For some, there might be an interest in opting out of this challenging class, but we advise against that and would advise all of our students to take this exit level course.