Oceanside High School updates its English program

Starting next year, Oceanside High School seniors will be able to delve into fantasy worlds, study the art of comics, find out how Shakespeare shaped the world and more, thanks to new offerings from the school’s English department.

The school will be changing the English courses it offers seniors next year. The district will keep its Advanced Placement Literature class, but will be doing away with British and World Literature classes. Instead, students will be able to choose between two different sets of single-semester classes in a program called Senior Seminar.

Senior Seminar A will offer Utopian and Dystopian Literature and Fantasy, Folklore and Fairy Tales. Senior Seminar B will offer The Graphic Novel and The World According to Shakespeare.

“We really just took a look at our senior program and wanted to give seniors an opportunity to experience a year of English that was going to help them transition more easily into college, where they were going to have some choice and there would be a variety of courses,” said Beth Zirogiannis, the district’s director of English and reading K-12.

The idea occurred to Zirogiannis when she took over as director of the department two years ago. Some of the teachers came to her, she said, and asked if they could expand the curriculum, offering seniors more choices. Part of the idea, she added, was to give them a taste of what it’s like to choose courses in college, where students have many options. The program not only does that, but also gives them semester-long classes.

“The only thing they didn’t get to experience is that they weren’t going to get closed out of anything,” Zirogiannis joked. “We would have run enough classes.”

The classes themselves were shaped with student contributions. “We met as a teacher group first, and it was a really great professional dialogue,” said Zirogiannis. “And we came up with a pretty long list of courses that the teachers thought the students would be interested in. It ranged from Beat poetry to a writing course.” Then she met with students from different classes and asked them what they thought of the classes teachers came up with.