Bethany Christian students took learning to a whole new level last week with the kickoff of the school’s two-week J-term program.

According to Jim Buller, guidance councilor at Bethany Christian Schools, the new J-term is essentially an upgrade to the school’s original Interterm program — a one-week session of non-credit experiential-learning courses offered either in the spring or fall of each school year.

Coined “J-term” due to its placement during the first two weeks of January, the new program replaces its non-credit counterpart with a myriad of for-credit courses never before available to the school’s middle and high school students.

“Bethany’s original interterm wasn’t long enough for the students to get academic credit. It was just kind of a fun enrichment kind of thing,” said Calvin Swartzendruber, a chemistry and physics teacher at the school who is heading up the school’s J-term Forensic Science course. “With J-term, in the two weeks it’s offered, they’re getting basically a semester’s worth of information, which we’ll actually give academic credit for. So that’s a big difference.”

Through J-term, students in grades nine through 11 can now earn an elective credit in one of 10 offered courses, including: Brazilian Culture; Human Behavior; Winter Sports; Civil Rights; Ceramics; and Comparative Mythology.

“We’ve decided to contain our first week to regular school hours, so we begin the day at 7:50 a.m. and at 3:30 p.m. we are dismissed,” Buller said. “The second week we are essentially allowing travel, so a number of classes will be doing things like visiting art galleries, museums, science labs, etc. In the end, almost all of our high school classes will have at least one overnight experience.”

Buller noted that such experiences could include a trip to Chicago’s Brazilian community for the Brazilian Culture class, or maybe a professional hockey game in Detroit for the Winter Sports class.

“We even have a group that will be traveling to Mississippi for a week for the Civil Rights class,” Buller said.

Previously excluded from participation in Interterm sessions, Buller noted that Bethany Middle School students will now also be required to take courses of their own as part of the switch to J-term.

Middle schoolers participate

Involvement by the middle schoolers will be somewhat different than their upperclassmen, however, with a majority of their time spent on or near the Bethany Christian campus.

“The middle schoolers will essentially have two half-day experiences per day over the course of the two weeks,” Buller said. “They are in one particular class for the morning, and then one particular class for the afternoon. So instead of being in a full eight hour experience, they break up the day a little bit, and that will continue for the duration of J-term.”

Not to be left out, seniors at Bethany Christian also have their own special experience connected with the new J-term.

“In their first week, the seniors are doing job shadowing to gain insight into various career interests,” Buller said. “Then the second week for seniors is reserved for the senior class trip. This year the kids will be heading to Nashville, so they’ll definitely be stepping out of the Goshen experience for that one.”

With the program’s first week only just concluded, Buller noted that initial feedback regarding J-term already appears to be heavily positive both for the teachers as well as the students.

“I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from my students because we’re able to do so much more in a day with our chosen topic,” said Jennifer Lucas-Germeyan, teacher of the J-term course Exploring Human Behavior. “With J-term, we don’t have the time constraints to worry about that we normally would during the normal semester. It really allows the students to become engaged, and they’re enjoying it.”

Swartzendruber also sees the J-term as a definite asset.

“It’s really a unique learning opportunity. There are so many chances that you have to get outside of the classroom and really do things in a concentrated setting that you wouldn’t necessarily have otherwise,” Swartzendruber said. “With J-term we have extended blocks of time where we can do these in-depth investigations and really hit it pretty hard. It’s almost like we’ve got even more time, because we’re not always shifting from one subject to another like you would during a normal school day.”

Student likes it

Even Bethany junior David Nussbaum appears to have jumped solidly onto the J-term bandwagon.

“I like J-term a lot better than Interterm. It’s a lot more interesting,” said Nussbaum, who chose Forensic Science as his J-term focus. “It’s working quite well. In fact, if I could change anything I might make it maybe more than two weeks long, so we have more time to go into detail with our topics.

“Like with fingerprint analysis, people take years and years to understand this, and I’m doing it in a day. So if we could have maybe three weeks, I think it would be even better.”