With the start of the new school year, the MFS community experienced updates to their curriculum and the MFS Mobile app. All these changes were set into action over the summer, and now that the school year has begun community members enjoyed these alterations coming to fruition. 

One of the two main curriculum changes this year is for the incoming freshman class which will be taking US History instead of 19th-Century World History. This change may also lead to different courses being offered for the 11th and 12th grade students in future years. 

As for what initiated the switch, Mr Thompson mentioned that “For a while, we’ve had a level of frustration on what [classes] seniors take and what [classes] they want to take. They say we should offer more diverse offerings but then everyone signs up for economics or whatever AP we are offering.”

The solution to allow upperclassmen to be eligible for a greater variety of classes is by rearranging the curriculum for freshmen and sophomores. The goal is to open up more history class options for upperclassmen.

“Allowing juniors to take an AP class in their junior year that is also offered in the senior year will let them open up to be able to take more diverse offerings,” commented Mr. Thompson.

Another initiative brought into action this year is the continuation of changing the freshmen science course from biology to physics. Although this change is not ready to be implemented yet, the head of the science department, Laura Slocum, is looking forward to this updated curriculum. 

Slocum gave WordsWorth some insight on what the new ninth grade physics would look: “The ninth graders are going to be learning about their macroscopic world and how it works, so things like how do cars do what they do, how do planes do what they do, and why do balls do what they do.” 

Slocum informed WordsWorth that within the last decade, numerous schools have been making this same change including two schools she worked at prior to MFS. Studying science in the order of physics, chemistry, then biology is supposed to increase student understanding.

“Because biology has become so much more complex in terms of what is biology… there is a lot of chemistry in biology and there are a lot of layers in biology like why do things structurally work the way they do,” said Slocum. “Also by moving physics before chemistry things like why do particles interact with each other [and] why do things behave the way they do… we can talk about those in our macroscopic world, where you can see things, and then we can apply that down at the micro- and nano-scopic level.” 

As for when students will learn biology, Slocum explained that this curriculum will be taught to the junior class, beginning when the current eighth graders are juniors. 

In other changes, MFS Mobile is an app made by a MFS alumn David Wei ‘19 and provides an accessible database for students to view their schedule, assignments, grades and more. Since MFS switched their course system from NetClassroom to a new platform, Wei had to update the app to alter the way it gathers schedule data. Additionally, Wei prepared his app for upcoming iOS updates: “I was adapting the app to iOS 13. This involves the adaptation of dark mode, new window animations and new security requirements. This will be available when iOS 13 is released.” 

Another exciting feature of the updates to MFS Mobile, Wei said, is that “the new mac Catalyst program allows me to bring the app to macOS. A Mac version of the app will be available on Mac App Store when macOS 10.15 is officially released.” This new feature will allow students to access their schedules, assignments, and data on their laptops as well as their phones or tablets.