Eleven new courses have been added to Bellaire’s course offerings: dual credit US History, OnRamps Precalculus, AP European History, OnRamps Microeconomics (which has replaced AP Microeconomics), AP Research (not covered), Mexican American Studies and AP African American Studies. There are also new CTE courses, including Foundations of User Experience, Principles of Information Technology and Fundamentals of Computer Science and Digital Media. However, please note that this is not a comprehensive list of all new courses.

Dual Credit US History

Dual credit US History teacher Sandy Lawrence has been teaching US history at the Houston Community College for seven years. But this is her first year teaching it at a high school.

“I had to ask them [to add the class],” Lawrence said. “A lot of the students from AP US History would drop down into my [on-level] class. I saw that they had the potential, but the only reason that they [dropped down] was because they’re not that invested in history.”

Lawrence believed that the reading and writing workload from English and history classes combined can overwhelm students and proposed a dual credit US History course. In terms of the material, dual credit is identical to AP US History, and it is also a 5.0 class.

“The only difference is that they will not be taking the AP exam,” she said. “They get six credit hours towards college and they get their CCMR points. They get the bonus to their GPA. So all the perks are still there.”

The biggest difficulty in teaching the new class has been managing a new schedule.

“The HISD calendar started on August 12 and HCC started on August 26, so the schedules don’t line up,” Lawrence explained. “But I really like it. I like the face-to-face with the students.”

Lawrence currently teaches 40 students in her dual credit class. She hopes to continue teaching the class next year as well.

“For our juniors, it creates that place where they can actually be challenged, yet they’re not going to be stressed about the AP exam,” Lawrence said.

Overall, Lawrence recommends dual credit US History to any students who are geared towards a career that is “not in humanities” but still want to take challenging courses.

OnRamps Precalculus

Johnston French, math teacher for IB Standard Level Math, Algebraic Reasoning and recently, OnRamps Precalculus, has mixed emotions about the new course, which along with AP Precalculus, has replaced both on-level and Pre-AP Precalculus.

“I taught regular precalculus before, and it’s a shame that that’s not being offered anymore,” French said. “OnRamps seems very challenging so far.”

French says OnRamps Precalculus is more difficult for both him and his students due to its structure.

“[OnRamps] uses a pedagogical strategy called inquiry-based learning, which is where the learning is a lot more in students’ hands,” French said. “I present [the students] with problems, and they work with their group to solve them, and the majority of the class is spent doing that and not me teaching direct instruction at all.”

At times, French feels restricted by the structure of OnRamps.

“I think students who are confused during class [get] discouraged more easily,” French said. “There’s less just repetition and practice, and there’s less of me doing direct instruction and more of them having to sit in their confused feeling.”

Nevertheless, French is proud of his 85 students and hopes they adjust to the course.

“Shout out to my students in OnRamps who are doing the work, working hard, putting their best foot forward and taking a challenging class,” French said. “I think if we continue to [do] our best, they’re going to get a lot out of it.”

Junior Jaydn Martinez thinks the course is beneficial for students who prefer to pace themselves.

“It’s so self-taught, like when you’re in the classroom and you ask the teacher a question, the response you get back is, ‘I don’t know, well, I guess that’s the question,’” Martinez said. “It’s such a strategic way of math.”

Martinez also likes that OnRamps Precalculus allows students to problem solve in groups.

“I don’t think we’ve done a single thing [individually] other than our quizzes,” Martinez said. “I’m a social person. I talk a lot. It makes it easier to understand, too.”

While Martinez feels that OnRamps Precalculus is a good fit for her, she understands that other students may not feel the same way.

“If you can teach yourself math, it’s a great class,” Martinez said. “But if you can’t, you’re screwed.”

AP European History

AP US History and AP European History teacher Grace Srouji brought back AP European History to Bellaire’s curriculum after it was discontinued from 2022-2024 due to lack of student interest. Srouji taught the class previously and is getting used to teaching it again.

“I’m having to remember all this stuff, but I’m also trying to improve on the things that I did the second time,” Srouji said. “I’ve improved [our year-long] project based on where I saw the kids struggling, how I can improve and how they could improve their information.”

This year, Srouji has seen much higher student interest in the class and noticed that the majority of AP European students were previous students from her AP US History classes.

“I had a kid who could have had an off-period and she took AP European History,” Srouji said. “It felt pretty good because I was in here promoting [it] from day one.”

Srouji feels that AP European History is the “next step” after AP US History, and that students “delve into information a lot more” in the class because they have already learned the basic skills and rudimentary information from AP US History and AP World History.

“I think that Euro gives them a chance to show off how much they have been able to learn in both skills and just general knowledge,” Srouji said.

This year, there are 28 students in Srouji’s AP European History class. Looking forward, she hopes to continue to teach it and emphasizes how engaging the course is.

“I hope that there continues to be interest because it’s just a fun class,” Srouji said. “It’s a lot of fun for a bunch of history nerds to just get together and talk about history.”

Senior Selim Guven signed up for AP European History after not being able to take it in his sophomore year. Introduced to him by Srouji, he immediately leaped at the chance.

“I’ve always liked history, and I [have] always really liked European history specifically,” Guven said. “I played games and watched videos connected to that. I think there’s a lot, especially from the Renaissance to the modern era, that we [have] never covered in as much depth in other classes.”

Guven recommends AP European History for students that have an interest in history beyond world history and US history.

“[We do] one long project, and we each pick our countries and partners,” Guven said. “We just follow them across the whole year, and we just keep doing projects and presenting about it.”

OnRamps Microeconomics

For AP Government, AP Macroeconomics and OnRamps Microeconomics teacher Alicia Miller, the change from AP to OnRamps for microeconomics has created the need for a new teaching style. Miller has never taught an OnRamps course before.

OnRamps is an initiative started by the University of Texas at Austin that provides an alternative to AP courses for high school students. Students are still able to receive a 5.0 credit through college assignments taught by a UT Austin professor and high school lectures in the classroom. This results in two grades: the high school one on the transcript and an optional college grade.

“I’m more of the facilitator,” Miller said. “The main focus is the college site. Everything I do in here is just to help support them, so that they can do good on [the] college stuff.”

While the expectations for Miller are different, she says OnRamps has made her job easier and more enjoyable. Her classes are also smaller than usual, with a total of 47 students and 15 students per class period on average, allowing her to have more one-on-one time with students.

“[UT] writes all the lessons, they make all the tests,” Miller said. “They make everything. So all I have to do [is] just come in and do what I really love to do, which is teach.”

Mexican American Studies

Alan Heise, who only started teaching at Bellaire last year, is teaching Mexican American Studies for the first time on top of AP World History. Mexican American Studies is part of the ethnic studies curriculum which includes African American Studies (mentioned below) and Asian American Studies.

With Mexican American Studies as Heise’s first period class, it has been “a little bit challenging” with students coming in late and dropping out of the course. He now has 16 students.

“Unfortunately, I have talked with several students who dropped the class for an off-period because they were interested in the course, but it was only offered for first period,” Heise said. “But the students who are here are interested and engaged in the material, and it’s been good to see them ask questions and make connections.”

The goal of the course is to make the topic relevant and connect it back to the community. That’s why the final two units of the course revolve around a research project that has local connections.

Heise recommends this course to everyone, regardless of whether they have any Mexican heritage.

“Ethnic studies is for anybody who’s trying to understand and contextualize events better,” Heise said. “It’s important to learn a different perspective than your own. You can apply that to life outside of [school].”

AP African American Studies

Like many other teachers of newly introduced courses, Jenaya Garrett-Foreman found the addition of AP African American Studies to be an eye-opening experience not only for her 31 students but also herself.

“I just said that I was interested in teaching it, and then I heard that I was going to be teaching it,” Garret-Foreman said. “My background is not history. It’s literature [and] reading, so [now] I’ve got to read to just get better and be prepared to teach the class.”

To add on to her pressure, the College Board AP African American Studies training program she originally intended to attend in Las Vegas was canceled, leaving her feeling unsuited to teach the incoming students.

“I was actually prepared to send an email to Principal Niggli like, ‘Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to teach this class,’” she explained. “‘I just don’t have the information that I need to teach it.’”

Only a few weeks before classes started, she received an email outlining the opportunity to attend the AP African American Studies training class from the comfort of her home. Despite the challenges, Garret-Foreman found teaching the new course to turn out better than she thought.

“I think for me, it’s really cool to see this class in schools,” she said. “I didn’t see history that looked like me until I went to college, so for it to be here and on campus and accessible to everybody is probably my favorite part of the class.”

Garrett-Foreman encourages every student of any race or ethnicity to join the class and experience all there is to learn about different cultures and people.

“At the end of the day, the more you know about everybody, the more you realize that we’re not that different, and you just have a better understanding of how to be a graceful human being to everybody,” Garrett-Foreman said.

Foundations of User Experience

CTE teacher Dalilah Whitmore has added the new Foundations of User Experience class to her roster on top of Global Business and IB Business Management. The new course is part of the entrepreneurship pathway.

“CTE programs are typically supposed to be what’s called a pathway, almost like a college major, where kids are learning about certain industries that are doing very well right now,” Whitmore said. “Right now, there’s a field called UX UI that is a booming field, and there’s a lot of career opportunities.”

The class focuses on both the user experience (UX) and user interaction (UI) side of the field. Whitmore believes it is becoming more important for entrepreneurs and business owners to consider UI UX when designing products and services.

“User experience is pretty much the design or the creation of different products, websites and apps in a way where it’s going to make those things more user friendly, more accessible to a larger customer base,” Whitmore said. “[For example], being able to translate things into different languages or considering different accommodations that people need as far as vision.”

Whitmore herself was already interested in UX before this year due to her background in graphic design and as an entrepreneur. She says there is a correlation between the “entrepreneurship and designer side” of UX UI.

Although student interest has been low this year, with less than 45 students, Whitmore believes that as the curriculum is fleshed out, more kids will become interested in the area.

“I think just by the title of the class, I wouldn’t expect a whole bunch of kids to be like, ‘Oh, I want to do that,’” Whitmore said. “Most people are not going to know what that means. But I have had students who come by with their friends and they’re like, ‘Oh, I want to take it now’ because they’re getting an understanding of what it is.”

Principles of InfoTech & Fundamentals of CS and Digital Information

CTE teacher Alaa Hourani currently teaches two new CTE courses: Principles of Information Technology and Fundamentals of Computer Science and Digital Information. Although she did not teach these courses in the past, she finds them “very interesting and easy for students to understand.”

According to Hourani, Principles of Information Technology focuses on building hard and soft skills for future career opportunities.

“You have to know how to present your skills,” Hourani says. “You have to practice those skills. [This] is the first part. [In] the second part, the student will start learning coding for programming languages.”

On the other hand, the first half of Computer Science and Digital Information focuses on the programming languages while the second half explores the networking side. Many of Hourani’s students are considering a career in computer science and are taking the course to learn more information in order to make a decision.

“They say, ‘Okay, we need to learn more and know more about this topic,’” Hourani says. “At the end of the year, they have a full picture so they can decide, ‘We would like to take another course for programming languages,’ like internet working.”

Hourani currently teaches 48 students in Principles of Information Technology and 31 in Fundamentals of Computer Science and Digital Information. She hopes to continue teaching these courses in the future, as she “loves programming languages” and considers it “her area.”