New courses emphasizing creativity and music bring more variety to curriculum

The school’s budding musicians and writers now have two more classes that allow them to improve their skills. 

Modular Guitar Study, taught by Anthony Lanzino, allows experienced guitarists to hone their skills and also gives students who have never touched a guitar to learn basic playing skills. Lanzino has separated the class into three levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced, which is why the class is called Modular Guitar Study.

Over the year-long course, students will learn how to play at least five songs and eventually perform in a year-end concert.

Each level requires the student to incorporate different types of guitar skills. For instance, a beginner will play only the chords of the song, while an advanced student will play the “difficult, alternating arpeggiated parts of the song,” Lanzino said.

Since there are 28 students in the class, Lanzino said the most daunting part of his class for him is maintaining all three different skill levels.

“The challenge in a class that has multiple skill levels is how to meet the needs of each person,” Lanzino said. “I’m figuring out ways to try not to bore the advanced player and not to overwhelm the new player.”

Lanzino hopes to expand the Modular Guitar Study to have each level be its own separate period during the day so that he will be able to spend more time on each skill level and also provide guitars for every student since for now, students have to bring their own guitars. Senior Corrine Bryan, an intermediate level player, agreed that separate classes would be ideal.

“Smaller class sizes would make the class better since it is a little bit tough to have one on one to with the teacher to learn faster,” Bryan said.

Creative Writing, an English elective taught by Sarah Thermond, requires students to write stories based on different types of fiction, such as personal narrative, poetry and script writing. Along with those stories, students will also learn about vocabulary and character development across the whole school year.

Students also write in their journals, which include open-ended free write prompts, notes on lectures and possibly specific exercises Thermond wants them to do. She said these journals will help them with their creativity when writing their stories.

So far, Thermond has seen a dramatic increase in students’ interest since course scheduling at the end of last year.

“We have added new students everyday for the first two weeks,” Thermond said. “So we had to go over all of week one’s curriculum again due to the number of new students.”

With 20 students in the class now, she believes that this class will become a more challenging community for students to expand their writing skills.

“[This class] has a really nice environment,” senior Diane Katchour said. “The teacher is really friendly and really enthusiastic about the class and so are all the students.”