Blog
Inside scoop on curriculum, teaching and product improvements
The Importance of a Balanced Course Load

You may have a student that complains, “I wanted to have six math classes and nothing else. Math all day is my thing!” But what these students don’t realize is the importance of having balance in a daily schedule. Sure, it’s fine to specialize, but having six math classes a day, even in high school, is overkill.

There are reasons why schools insist on students having balanced course loads. It’s kind of like the academic food pyramid–a balance is essential. Exposure to different academic fields allows different parts of the brain to grow and develop, rather than having all of the growth occur in one part of the brain. It allows us to be more well-rounded individuals, which is much of the reason why classes such as art and music find their way into school curricula in addition to “core” subjects such as history and science.

There is also the fear of burnout at any age, and is why all high schools and even most colleges carry some form of a core curriculum (many colleges now use a type of core curriculum called distribution requirements, which allow for some student choice while maintaining the idea of a balanced schedule). A brain, especially one that is young and still developing, is prone to being overly taxed if it is overloaded on one subject in a single sitting. Giving students shorter chunks of classes in different subject areas gives them more variety and makes burnout much harder. Do note that, however, there is no issue with schools allowing students to take two science courses or two foreign languages concurrently in high school. This is generally not sufficient to cause burnout, and it promotes deeper study in an area of particular interest to the student. This flexibility also fosters the development of learners and thinkers that specialize in different areas, leading to different job opportunities that each person is best qualified for.

Finally, the balanced course load approach also better prepares students for their futures. Why? Because many careers are multidisciplinary in nature. One of the most obvious examples is the group of engineering careers, which require a combination of math, science, and computer science in some cases. Some other careers combine other fields. Economists use a combination of history and mathematics to do their work. And most of all, many, many careers are writing-intensive, making a strong writing foundation very important for students to obtain through English classes up until they graduate from high school, and usually past that milestone, too.

Joshua Siktar
Joshua SIktar is a the Lead Content & Community Lead at OpenCuriculum