At DeAnza School, No More Cutting Music Class

On cue, 11-year-old Sergio Huerta rose from his seat, placed the tip of the wooden recorder in his mouth and piped out part of a popular ballad on the flutelike instrument.

It hadn’t always sounded so good.

Before taking the music class at DeAnza Middle School in Ventura, Sergio had never played an instrument, he said. And his first efforts were more screech than song.

But, unlike students at most other schools, he didn’t have the option of dropping the course and choosing another to fill fourth period.

At DeAnza, music, wood shop and other courses that have traditionally been electives in junior high and middle school are now required classes: the least artistic children learn to draw, the most clumsy work with their hands in shop.

The idea, school officials say, is that middle school students should learn what their interests are by trying many different things--even if they have to be forced.

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DeAnza began three years ago to require all sixth- through eighth-grade students to enroll in exploratory courses in fine arts and technology in place of electives.

Ventura’s other three middle schools until recently have continued to offer electives to seventh- and eighth-grade students.

But this fall, Balboa Middle School followed DeAnza’s lead, putting its seventh-grade students into a rotating exploratory curriculum that includes both home-making and industrial arts.

“We want them to get exposure to something they may not choose,” said Balboa Principal Henry Robertson. “The boys are learning to cook and sew and the girls are learning to hammer and saw.”

At Balboa and DeAnza, all students in each grade level take the same exploratory courses at the same time. Only children enrolled in band are exempt.

On Monday, DeAnza sixth-graders like Sergio rehearsed for a concert they will perform today marking the end of their 12-week stint in music class before wood shop class begins. After music and wood shop, all sixth-grade students spend the last part of the year taking art. Two doors down from Sergio’s classroom, a group of eighth-graders also spent Monday enjoying the fruits of their labors of the past 12 weeks.

On a plastic track that stretched the length of their room, the students raced model cars, powered by carbon dioxide cartridges, at speeds up to 36 m.p.h.. They built the cars in their educational technology class.

DeAnza students take their first course in educational technology in seventh grade, when they also study computers and art. In eighth grade, all children at the school move from educational technology to art to performing arts.

Eighth-grader Shilow Cornett was skeptical when she took her first class in educational technology, she said.

Instructor Jim Hughes teaches the class in 12 rotating, weeklong mini-courses, or “modules,” that range from bridge-building to computer-aided drafting. While two or three students huddle around a computer studying robotics, for example, another group is at work on lathes building model race cars.

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To Shilow’s surprise, one section of the course changed her career goals: She learned how to operate microphones and radio-broadcasting equipment.

“I used to always want to be a midwife,” Shilow said. “But it’s changed my mind to want to work in a radio station.”