A recent survey on the correlation between students’ conservatory and favorite academic and elective classes brings focus to the variety of things CSArts students enjoy.
As a charter school, CSArts is unique because the school day is split into two parts: academic and conservatory classes. From the morning until the early afternoon, students focus on their main academic subjects and elective courses, later shifting into arts classes focusing on their specific interests.
Because of this variety, a survey created by CSArtisan staff studies how conservatories can affect students’ academic and elective preferences. From the 61 responses, although some results were to be expected, others were more surprising.
Some conservatories can be tied to academic classes through their similar nature. For example, over half of Instrumental Music students like math. “Music is very mathematical, with patterns, functions, and wavelengths,” says Nicole Read, the Principal of Academics. “I think it all kind of goes together. I have a little guy who’s very gifted at math, and he’s also into music.” Given the patterns and structure behind music, Read finds that this result makes sense.
The same goes for the Acting Conservatory, where all three student respondents show a preference for history. Read finds that to embody a character, you need to understand the context and perspective, while history is really the discipline of those two things.
There were, however, results that made less sense. “Fascinating,” says Read in response to Creative Writers equally liking English and Science. “My thought is people write about everything, and the more books I read, the more I’m surprised by how many interesting things writers have to know about in order to write authentically about them.” Any book about medicine, law, philosophy, and other topics, Read says, requires the writers to know a lot of information relating to those disciplines.
And Creative Writing isn’t the only conservatory that has a lot of science-oriented students. In the Integrated Arts and Visual Arts conservatories, over 60% of respondents show a specific interest in the sciences, reflecting how many CSArts students go into STEM following graduation. “I think our students– we know that when they graduate here, half of them go on to pursue arts, half go on to pursue academics, and a very strong number of those students pursue a field in STEM-related fields,” says Read. Given that, it is a lot less surprising that so many students like science than may initially seem.
The Commercial Dance conservatory reflects an ongoing theme in the dance industry by preferring the Hip Hop elective. “They have to have training in all the disciplines, but that certainly seems to be what’s kind of the contemporary draw to dance,” says Read, sharing her experience seeing short videos of Hip Hop being posted and reshared.
Integrated Arts students, who practice an assortment of different types of art, also enjoy many of their academic and elective classes due to the variety they provide. “That sort of fits how I see the industry going for artists,” says Read. She recounts how actors these days can’t just act anymore, but many also produce and direct. Multifaceted artists, she says, is what the art industry has needed recently.
In general, the amount of variety shown in student interests will be beneficial to their futures. The first thing that students focus on will not always be the direction they want to take in the future, so Read believes that it’s best for students to explore their interests before they focus on one thing. “I think it’s great to embrace this kind of differentiation.” It’s good to have a wide variety of interests in high school because Read finds that many CSArts alumni often change their majors in college.
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