With the time coming up for students to select their classes for the 2025-26 school year, science classes look a little different than this year.
Three teachers who have been teaching at Aliso for many years have decided to retire after this year: Mrs. Roche, Mr. Jansen and Mr. Stirtz. The classes they taught will be taken over or removed from the options for students to choose.
Mrs. Roche is one of three honors Chemistry teachers, and the only AP Chemistry teacher at Aliso. Upon her retirement, the AP Chemistry class will likely be taught by Ms. Zhou. Another change to chemistry is that next year, freshmen and sophomores will be barred from taking AP Chemistry due to many underclassmen struggling with that grade and tricky material.
Mr. Jansen currently teaches AP Physics I and AP Physics C Mechanics, with the C representing calculus. The following course for students enrolled in AP Physics C Mechanics would be to take AP Physics C Electricity & Magnetism, however, that course will not be offered next year.
In place of the Electricity & Magnetism course, AP Physics II will be offered which includes units of the former class along with new content knowledge.
Mr. Jansen said, “AP 2 in ways is an advantage over Physics C Electricity & Magnetism because it covers electricity, magnetism, thermodynamics, waves, optics and modern, so it’s a better introduction to the other bridges of physics but it’s not going to have the same math level of Electricity & Magnetism which is insanely complicated”
The new physics class will be taught by Mr. Lau, Mr. Mosier or possibly a completely new staff member.
The Anatomy and Physiology class has also lost its teacher for the upcoming school year. That position could go to a current biology teacher or a new hire.
Once again, Honors Marine Ecology will be offered but if not enough people sign up the course will not be available. The people who did choose the honors version of the course will be grouped in the regular marine ecology class, which is what happened this school year.
There should be no change to Biotechnology, Forensics or AP Biology.
These changes to the entire department give students something different to think about now when they finalize their classes.
Jessica Duan (11) said, “Originally I was going to take AP Bio but now that Physics 2 is available I’m considering taking it as my science instead.”
She likes that it better aligns with her career path of engineering by covering the full basics. A class that engineers have to take in college and struggle at is thermodynamics so having background knowledge into those types of problems will be extremely helpful for her.
