Explaining TJ’s Unique Course Catalogue Offerings – Grade 9
I’m writing this blog to try to provide more clarity around what exact classes that TJ offers and how students can benefit from this knowledge beforehand. The TJ course catalogue is pretty amazing and almost all the teachers I had were great and extremely knowledgeable. I’ll start with the typical TJ curriculum courses that you have to take, and explain some details about each of them (what’s unique about them, what you can do to prepare for them, what students commonly think about each of the courses, etc.)
Based on conversations I had with current TJ students, everything has stayed the same (I verified all the information in this post with the TJ website and their own experiences). They had different subjective opinions about how difficult or easy they thought some of these courses were (usually they thought it was easier than I remember, interesting), so take that as you may 😊
During your freshman year, you’ll take a mostly standard class listing, and many of your peers will be in the same classes as you (i.e. IBET, more on that soon).
You’ll take Health and PE 9, any World Language of your choosing, mathematics, one elective, and IBET (integrated biology, English, and technology).
You can choose to take a new world language that you may not have had the opportunity to take in middle school, or you can continue the world language that you have been learning in the past. I took German in 9th and 10th grade and AP German in 11th grade.
Based on the math you’ve been taking in middle school, you’ll be placed into a math class. Unless you took a math class in summer school the summer before 9th grade, you’ll be taking a course called “TJHSST Research Statistics 1” during your fall semester at TJ. This is a course that details a lot of the statistical tests that researchers do in order to sift through data and figure out the “power” and “significance” of those results. In my experience, it was a very interesting and rigorous course with a lot of interesting case studies and writing. The next semester, you’ll probably be taking TJHSST Math 1, 3, or 4 depending on the math you took in 8th grade.
Health and PE 9 is pretty self-explanatory. It’s almost the same thing you did in middle school, except that the “Health” portion of the course was a little difficult, in my experience several years ago. We learned a little about the nervous system and mental health and giving CPR.
You have several elective options, including journalism, photojournalism, performing arts, visual arts, ancient and classical civilizations, and computer science. I took “foundations computer science”, in which we learned Java through five packets, and each class we had a “lab” in which we created a software that would solve some problem. It was a very interesting class, and I learned a lot in a very structured way. The packets were all well-designed in my opinion, and I had a great time in that course. For my final project, I worked with a partner to create our best attempt at an online checkers game. Our submitted project did have a few bugs in it, but overall we were happy with our end result.
Finally, you have IBET (Integrated Biology, English, and Design and Technology). This is really three classes, but you’ll be with the same class of students in all three classes, and you’ll all have the same three teachers. Several times, the teachers will collaborate to give you cross-disciplinary projects. Most importantly, you’ll have a year-long project called the IBET project, in which you’ll do a research project over the course of the year, and at the end submit a 20-page report of what your experiment looked like and what you discovered. You’ll also give a presentation on your project.
In English, there’ll be quite a bit of reading and writing. We read some pretty difficult texts like The Odyssey, but if you take the course seriously and do your best efforts, there’s a lot to learn.
Design and Technology has some of the coolest machines that you may ever use. It’s very hands-on, and though there were times when I was really stressed about meeting some of the deadlines for building our robot or creating the electric circuit to make several light bulbs glow in a parallel circuit, it was all very educational and interesting. At the end of the year, you’ll have a “robot project”, in which you’ll have to build and design and program a robot to go through the maze. For our project, we were judged on four categories and would receive a score, based on the beauty of the robot, its completion of the maze, and other factors.
Biology is most likely the class that will be most difficult for incoming TJ students. There’s a lot of information, but it’s all highly useful information. Much of the biology course content that students learn in 9th grade shows up frequently again in AP Biology and in college biology courses, such as “General Biology” and “General Chemistry” and even more advanced courses like “Biochemistry”. It’s also very interesting for students because for the first time they’ll be learning this information to this depth. My recommendation would be for students to supplement their learning with online resources such as Youtube videos and blogs, since the course content is very important and shows up so frequently that there are a lot of helpful resources online.
The last option is to take a “9th course”, which you can take online and pay a fee. I personally did not do this (most students did not), and the first year is sufficiently difficult and filled with homework that I would not recommend adding more courses. This is of course something that you can talk with your TJ counselor if you’re interested and inclined in adding a course to your schedule.
I hope this was helpful! It’s something that many students have asked and I wanted to write a blog to clarify some of the confusion. Please let me know if you have any questions, either on email or in the comments section, and I’ll try to write a blog post about it. Thanks so much for reading! -Naman
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