Falling behind in a class can be a major stumbling block for any student, but there’s one class on campus that’s trying to overcome such an obstacle.

This year on-level chemistry is self-paced, giving the students the freedom with their learning.

“This year there’s a lot more with students being able to choose their own pace. There’s a lot more spread in what students are learning on any day,” chemistry teacher Donald McNeal said. “Someone may be working on states of matter, and someone else may be working on the periodic table, and they are doing different things at the same time.” 

For students such as sophomore Sam Skolnick, taking control over their learning is less of a stress.

“I like the change, I think it’s very beneficial to some learners and I prefer self paced because I’m not as stressed with due assignments and there are no late assignments anymore,” Skolnick said. “So I think it’s very beneficial to lots of people.” 

One roadblock faced by the teachers was quickly addressed.

“The most frequent complaint that we’ve got were, or concern, is that students aren’t sure what they should be doing on any particular day,” McNeal said. “We recently addressed that by putting up a pacing guide so that students have kind of like a general idea to keep them on pace with where they need to be by the end unit, and by the end of the grading period.”