Discover your voice: In the classroom

Writing Program

The Waring Writing Program helps students to develop and discover authentic, personal voices. This is commonly called "creative writing," though the term is misleading, since expository writing is an equally creative endeavor. At all levels of the program, students write poems, stories, dialogues, plays, and personal essays. But whatever the genre, they write every week of their Waring career, and by doing so develop both imagination and self-knowledge. We are certain that the Writing Program helps our students to speak personally and memorably at Convocation and Graduation every year: more important still, it helps them to develop "inner resources" that they otherwise might never have discovered.

Writing, like any discipline, is partly a matter of habit, so regular writing habits are established from the start. A student learns quickly that work is not written only for the teacher; instead, writing is presented to, and critiqued by both peers and instructors. Audience, in fact, is at the center of the Waring Writing Program. Over time, the writing class audience becomes sophisticated in their critical comments; writers, in turn, increasingly understand how their work affects the audience. To put it another way: whether a student has just entered the CORE Program or is about to complete the senior year at Waring, writing classes are workshops: students write, critique each other, revise, polish, and create portfolios. They also publish pieces in the school newspaper and at times share their work with the community at All-School Meeting. At every level of the program, classes meet twice a week.

Our students are successful contributors to the Beverly Public Library Teen Poetry Contest each year. Every year, in March, Waring holds a Young Writers Conference, drawing published authors from around the country and high school writers from the Boston area, including some of our own students. In May, we send one or two juniors to The New England Young Writers' Conference at Bread Loaf, in Ripton, Vermont.

Grades 6, 7, & 8

Sixth, seventh, and eighth grade classes typically have between nine and eleven students. They are taught by junior and senior student Teaching Assistants (TAs), under the direct supervision of adult writing teachers, who meet with them frequently to discuss both pedagogy and students. We do this for a number of reasons, but most essentially because we find that the TAs promote enthusiasm for, and knowledge of, the Writing Program immediately, as well as foster strong and beneficial relationships between younger students and older students. As Writing TAs, the juniors and seniors are "culture-bearers:" that is, they carry the long-established Waring writing culture to our next generation of students.

Eighth grade Theater builds on the foundations established in CORE Theater, beginning with a review of technique and moving on to monologue and improvisation. Students write "self-scripted" pieces and may perform them publicly at All-School Meetings. During the year students typically perform in a play directly related to a current humanities topic. Often, the eighth grade art classes assist in set creation.

Grades 9 & 10

Grades nine and ten are taught together, in sections no larger than twelve. Either a genre approach is used, with times during the year devoted to such topics as fiction, poetry, and personal essay, or a thematic approach is used, with assignments built around particular themes developed by writing teachers. In both cases, the classes are conducted as writing workshops.

Grades 11 & 12

In Grades 11 and 12 students choose their writing classes, which are semester-long and focus on a particular topic. In recent years, the offerings have included Fiction, Poetry, Personal Essay, Playwriting, Screenplay Writing, and Le Temps Retrouvé, the school newspaper. On occasion, under the supervision of a Waring faculty member, students do an independent study on a particular writing topic that they wish to explore in depth.