Course Catalog Expands for 2025

Trevor students are very fortunate to have the opportunity to build their schedules and choose from various course options. Rising freshmen and sophomores can pick up to 3 arts electives and a P.E. elective, and rising sophomores are able to take an additional science. Moreover, rising juniors and seniors each select English and history electives. Course catalogs for the 2025-26 school year were recently released, and students eagerly anticipated the opportunity to complete their course enrollment forms.

Among this school year’s course offerings are English electives such as “Modern Japanese Literature,” “Hunger Games and Social Issues,” and “Advanced English: The Novel,” as well as History electives such as “Advanced History: European History,” “Economics: Global Perspectives,” and “Africa and the Diaspora since 1900.” Next fall, though, Trevor will offer an advanced history elective titled “Advanced History: Foundations of Empire.” This course explores different empires throughout history, such as Persia, Greece, India, Rome, and China. This elective promises that students will learn about aspects of these empires’ cultures, such as art, religion, and military advancements.

This course, despite never having been offered before, has been a hot topic of discussion among students, and many are excited to sign up for this elective. Mr. CB, who will be teaching the class, discussed the process of creating a new course and what will be covered in his class. He was very enthusiastic about this course, as he has studied ancient history and empires and is excited to share his passion with students. He said that he had been interested in teaching ancient history for years, and that this year he just had to pull all of his ideas together into one course.

While at first Mr. CB considered doing a deep dive into one ancient civilization or a focus on the ancient world generally, neither of these seemed quite right. “Trevor courses,” he said, “aim to be both broad enough to fill a full year and narrow enough to give students a thorough understanding of the topic.” This is how he decided on a survey of empires in the ancient world. He claimed that this was both because of student interest in ancient civilizations and the prevalence of ancient empires in pop culture and current trends. He was correct in his assessment of student interest; the Empires course has been a popular conversation topic among upperclassmen in recent weeks.

Mr. CB continued, describing the class’s focus on directly analyzing primary sources through what he called “explosions”—writing assignments that encourage students to extract a huge amount of information and make connections with just a single source—and allowing students to follow subtopics of their interest. He also mentioned the possibility of taking field trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which he described as “the best repository of ancient artifacts in the city,” to see the sources students analyze in-person.

Overall, Mr. CB hopes that through this course, students will come away with a deeper appreciation for the ancient world as well as the skill of processing and analyzing dense (but rewarding) information. The elective options for the coming school year are engaging and rigorous; students are recommended to take a careful look at the course catalog, think about how busy they want their schedule to be, and discuss their decisions with their families and advisors.