Curriculum fitted with seven new offerings
By: Lacey Korevec
MONROE Students at Applegarth and Monroe Township High School may find themselves with a few more options this year.
Seven new courses are being offered to Monroe high school and middle school students this year, Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum Chris Tienken said Tuesday. In addition, the district has revamped the curriculum of a number of existing courses to better meet students’ needs.
Business organization and management is a college-level course that high school students can take in the building to receive three credits at Middlesex County College. The high school also is offering a new advanced placement course, Calculus BC, which follows advanced placement Calculus AB and allows students who take both courses to gain a total of six to nine college credits, depending on final exam scores. Students there also can take Latin 1, Italian 3 and a course called senior seminar, which helps students investigate future career options, he said.
At the middle school level, digital photography and Italian have been added to Applegarth’s course offerings. The curriculums for architectural design, French 1A and 1B, technology K-6, and journalism 1 and 2 all have been reviewed and revamped, he said. The SAT verbal program and the trigonometry and math analysis honors programs also have been reworked for this year.
The district does not work on revising curriculum only during the summertime, he said. It has rewritten curriculum for 40 courses during the past 40 months.
"We write curriculum all year long," Dr. Tienken said. "It’s continuous curriculum renewal."
Though the district’s official goals for the year will not be announced until the Oct. 18 school board meeting, Dr. Tienken said that some of the goals will focus on reading in the elementary schools, writing for K-8 and mathematics problem solving for grades three through eight.
"In mathematics, students will spend a lot of time in grades three through eight on open-ended problem solving," he said. At the high school level, goals will deal with reading and writing for grades nine through 12 and social studies for grades nine through 11.
"We are trying to make our curriculum more student centered, that is, we’re trying to connect the content that students have to learn to their lives through authentic examples and problem situations," he said.
Another focus will be steering curriculum in a direction that meets the state’s Core Curriculum Content Standards, but also meets the needs of individual students. He said it’s important that students are fed information in a way that will help them retain it.
"In grade eight, just mathematics alone, there are approximately 144 separate items that students have to know or be able to do," he said. "Kids are learning hundreds of facts and skills every year. That’s a lot to remember. Kids remember more when the skills and knowledge are meaningful to them."
High school students can expect to see more primary source documents being used in their social studies and history classrooms, he said.
"Instead of reading about what the founding fathers said, they’re going to actually read what the founding fathers wrote," he said. "They’ll study the documents. It brings social studies and history out of the text book."
Increasing individual student achievement will be another project for the district, Dr. Tienken said.
"We’d like to see more students get scholarship money for college," he said. "We’d like to see more awards for our students, more students in the National Honors Society, more Bloustein Scholars. We’d like to see a continual increase in that," he said.
The district plans to meet increasing enrollment demands academically by continuing to increase its number of staff members and by orienting them and training them extensively.
"Professional development and teacher induction is very important in a district that’s growing as fast as we are," he said. "We’re bringing large amounts of teachers into the district and have to prepare them for the way that we do things in this district."

