Finding Your Elective

Fitz Intermediate provides a variety of electives for students to choose from. Every student is required to pick an elective every year that counts as one period—an elective is a period with certain activities and work—but what if students had trouble choosing which one they would like to join?

Fitz currently has 10 electives for students to join for our 2022-2023 school year; ASB, Journalism, Art, AVID, Band, Choir, Orchestra, Medical Detective, STEM, Robotics, Student Services, and Computer Science. Some being semester electives, some being full-year.

ASB is an all-year elective that works together to create a positive school environment for students and staff at Fitz. The ASB advisor is Ms. Trujillo, who tries her hardest to encourage and give students a place where they can be happy at. Alexa Quach said, “I think Ms. Trujillo is an encouraging teacher. She always tries to encourage us to make sure that our grades are caught up before report cards, she lets us do what we enjoy like painting, studying, making posters, coming up with ideas, and even shows us places around campus that we’ve never seen before– like the family resource center! She wants to make the school more entertaining for other students.” ASB members are able to use their creativity to plan school events and make posters with Ms. Trujillo’s permission. ASB tries its hardest to spread Fitz spirit all around the school by hanging up posters with positive messages; their main objective is to make Fitz a fun and safe environment for everyone.

An elective that is also filled with creativity is Journalism, an all-year elective ran by Mrs. Weirich. Mrs. Weirich makes any student feel welcomed and she tries her best to encourage students to keep trying and trying no matter what subject and topic it is. Journalism consists of Falcon Flyer News—a newscast that makes an appearance alsmot every Falcon Focus—putting together the yearbook, and making articles every quarter that will be submitted to our Journalism website.

There are many electives that use your creativity, but we are not going to forget about art! Like music, art has different periods and classes; Advanced Art, Intro Art, Drawing & Painting, and Crafts. Ms. Sneddon enlightens the class by showing methods, videos, and using Edpuzzles to show her students how to paint, use clay, and perspectives in drawing. “I enjoy being in art because you can express yourself in your artwork by painting abstract art. The color scheme can express meaning and feeling,” an anonymous seventh grader said.

Another all-year elective is AVID. AVID is an elective class that lasts until you graduate from high school, ran by two teachers in different periods; Mr. Nguyen and Mrs. Bullis. In AVID, you take Cornell Notes about different subjects extremely often, as well as making spreadsheets about budgeting and what to do with your time. Mr. Nguyen wants to set an objective and prepare his students for the future. “Mr. Nguyen brought succulents for his students to research on how to take care of them and how to apply it to real life. He purposely didn’t take responsibility for the plants because he wanted his own students to take responsibility of their own items,” said an anonymous seventh-grader. The plant represented a life that his students were supposed to take of, merely to show what responsibility was.

Music! Music is also an all-year elective. It has four separate electives; Band, Orchestra, Choir, and Drumline. Both Band and Orchestra are taught by Mrs. Gohn– Choir is taught by Mrs. Smith. Orchestra is split into two levels, Beginning Strings and Advanced Strings. The instruments played in band are the baritone, clarinet, flute, saxophone, trombone, trumpet, tuba, percussion, and many others. While Orchestra plays the bass, cello, viola, and violin. Music students are able to go to events with Ms. Gohn’s permission to perform and show their talent! “I decided to join orchestra because I really enjoy classical music and I wanted to expand my knowledge of it and music in general because it teaches you about music theory,” said Nathan Medrano.

Continuing with full-year electives, Stem, Medical Detective, and Robotics are all taught by Ms. Corona. Medical Detective studies diseases and health-harming topics, finding ways to cure and protect, while Robotics has a mission of creating functional robots.

Moving on to semester electives, Computer Science! Computer Science is ran and taught by Mr. Housepian. In Computer Science, for 2022-2023, students will be coding, making arduinos, 3d printing, and making digital animations. “I decided to teach Computer Science because I’ve always been interested in computer software and technology in general,” Mr. Housepian claimed.

There are many enjoyable electives from Fitz to choose from! We hope you’ll be able to find an elective suitable for you.