Students finished the first semester of new classes offered through a new curriculum put in place starting for the 2024-2025 school year.
The new curriculum now offers students who are taking classes in the English and Journalism departments eight new courses. For English, the classes include: Myths and Legends, Young Adult Literature, Multicultural Literature, 21st Century Literature, Sports in Literature, and Literature of War. For Journalism, the classes are Digital Design and Media Production.
“Overall, I think the new curriculum launch has gone really well. The problem that I have though is I am only one advisor and it’s very challenging to try and teach all of these classes when no one else can teach them, so what I ended up having to do is putting Media Production in the same period as Newspaper Production, which isn’t ideal,” Journalism Department Chair Stephenie Conley said.
Previously, the English pathway consisted of 9-12th English classes for all students, but this year, a new one was implemented. After students complete 9th and 10th grade English, they are required to pick two English electives (one semester each) for 11th and 12th grade to receive all required English credits.
“It’s way easier than a normal English class,” junior Allen Faison said. “I would definitely recommend it and I feel like it’s pretty easy as long as you do your work.”
Getting to choose English courses based on personalized interests is something the new curriculum offers to students. Faison completed Sports in Literature and chose the class based on his current experience of participating in athletics.
“I feel like I can connect to the class because I’m an athlete,” Faison said. “I learned how confidence plays a role in sports because if you’re not confident in yourself, you’re not going to play well. Having confidence in myself changed my game completely, that’s really one thing I took from the class.”
Digital Design is meant to be an intermediate class students take after Photography and Graphic Design. However, some students just dive right into the course. Students are introduced to new projects and skills not available in previous classes such as a magazine layout, PSA, and career research into fields involving Digital Design.
“I liked it and it was fun because I got to be creative in it, and for all the projects I was able to do stuff that interested me,” freshman Balin Tomasello said. “It helped me figure out what looked good on a design instead of just throwing things together and hoping it looked good. It helped me figure out what looks good and how the text, fonts, and colors go together.”
In addition to Yearbook and Newspaper Production, Media Production was added to the BEAST Student Media Organization. Media Production gives students the ability to make broadcast journalism projects, feature stories, news stories, and Friday announcements, which is a current series students are producing and publishing to the BEAST Student Media website.
“We tried to squeeze that in other classes before like newspaper but they just don’t have the time when they are working on writing stories to do videos,” Conley said. “This gives kids a dedicated opportunity to focus on that type of media and then, of course, we can compete. They are a varsity program– so they can compete at the state level– which we didn’t have before, so it’s nice for them to be able to do that.”
The new production staff consists of 10 members and is student-run just like the rest of the productions. A small group spends the week filming and editing the weekly announcement videos that get played during students’ Advisory classrooms every Friday. In the meantime, the rest of the members work on other video projects related to sports games and events.
“I think Media Production could be more put together in the future since this is the first year of us doing it,” sophomore Audrey Sloan said.
