That sounds similar to how my school in Australia worked. I wanted to study Engineering at university so was required to have a certain amount of advanced Math

That sounds similar to how my school in Australia worked. I wanted to study Engineering at university so was required to have a certain amount of advanced Mathematics courses as well as physics. We had two Math Streams, the advanced stream and regular stream. I was in the advanced stream but I had friends who were in the normal stream I remember feeling jealous because the normal stream got to do lots of excursions and other "fun" activities. For example my friend's entire math class played ten pin bowling at local bowling ally (ostensibly so they could compare scores and learn about median and distributions). Their class also got to visit the horse racing track to learn about odds and probability. I think these were ham-fisted attempts to make mathematics "fun". Meanwhile my advanced class got to enjoy none of this and were stuck in the classroom all the time. At the time it felt more like a punishment then a reward.