Collaboration and immersion in a diverse community: Waring School, where “oui” means “us,” all of us.

I was thirteen years old, about to walk backwards off a granite cliff. It was my first Endterm at the Waring School, where I was finishing my eighth-grade year, and my science teacher and my French teacher had brought a group of us to New Hampshire’s White Mountains to see what we could learn from camping and rock-climbing. I was strapped into a webbing harness, clipped by a carabiner to a sturdy climbing rope, on an anchor built by our resident professional, a man we students knew as “Camper Dave.”

New students were welcomed into the Waring community during a Convocation Ceremony on Saturday, September 25.

What does it mean to be a part of the Waring community? Take a look at this year's Convocation Speeches to learn what it means to members of Waring's senior class, faculty, administration, trustees, and parents. 

Waring is thrilled to announce that both their two First Tech Challenge (FTC) teams Lupine robotics and Wolfpack Machina emerged winners at the MA State FTC Championships!

Jean de La Fontaine was born four centuries ago, on July 8, 1621 in Château-Thierry. Inspired by the fabulists of Greco-Latin antiquity, and in particular by Aesop, he wrote more than two hundred and forty Fables, bringing this hitherto minor genre to a degree of accomplishment that remains unequalled. Moralist without being moralistic, La Fontaine uses animals to depict human failings, thus taking a lucid look at human nature and power relationships.

In the months of January and February, students in Groups 2 and 3 in Monotheism and The Middle East course studied Islamic history and literature. Students read poetry by Sufi poets Rabi’a al-addawiyyah, Rumi, and Hafez, and reflect on the poetry’s mystical themes of divine love, separation, the self, self-annihilation, asceticism, and transcendence. 

The Art Department is pleased to present our first Featured Artist, Keanu Prescod, Class of 2022. Keanu has been working with spray paint as a medium, exploring its myriad possibilities.

Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming. 

A lot of people work two jobs. I’m one of them. During the school year, I work as a high school Humanities teacher at Waring School. During weekends and vacations, I work as a Family Nurse Practitioner in Lynn Community Health Center’s Urgent Care department. I go back and forth, physically and mentally: now I’m a teacher immersed in correcting student essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved or facilitating a class on the Marias River Massacre, now I’m a nurse practitioner racing to keep up with the press of patients on a winter weekend or listening for the faint wheeze of asthma in a child’s lungs. I love what I do at both jobs, and they teach me constantly about everything from decoding narrative to the value of being still and listening. 

Every spring Waring eighth graders pen fictional—often outlandish and whimsical—tales about members of the senior class. During the final week of school, they share them during All-School Meeting. Check out this year's excellent "Senior Pieces" below (including a special tale about two long-time Waring teachers who announced their retirement this spring).

The juniors and their families at my school are feeling anxious about how the college application process will unfold next fall. The fact is that no one really knows what the fall will look like. The colleges with which I have had conversations all plan to open as usual in September and expect to host campus visits, group information sessions, tours, and to offer interviews. They also readily acknowledge that in spite of their best efforts to plan for a return to normalcy, no one really knows what our world will look like next fall.

A strong sense of togetherness has always defined the Waring community. While we shouldn't share a common space now, we can always share the Waring experience. Below are eight free online resources inspired by our curriculum. Please stay connected and try a few at home.

Monday, February 24, was an historic day for Waring School as we broke ground on our new school building. The journey up to this point has been a community effort, from concept through design, and is worth celebrating. We would never have reached this stage without the generosity of our community, the philanthropy of some 375 donors, and the participation of our students, faculty, trustees, and many others.

In Asbury Park, New Jersey, in  May of 1988, I was part of a group of teachers hired to grade the essay portion of the National Teacher Examination for the Educational Testing Service, the test creation-arm of the College Board. Asbury Park is best known for the Stone Pony, a music venue that hosted New Jersey native, “The Boss,” Bruce Springsteen, and also for its now dilapidated Boardwalk. Asbury Park also has the dubious distinction of being the second most dangerous city in New Jersey.

One of Waring School’s earliest viewbooks includes the following quote attributed to 16th-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne. 

It reads, “There is nothing like arousing the children’s interests and affections, their appetite for learning. By whipping them you may give them their pocketful of knowledge, even make of them asses loaded with books. But if learning is to do them any good they must espouse it.”

With the prospect of a fully certified Passive House school building now only months away, no one is owning our school building project more than our students themselves. This week in All-School Meeting, several members of the FIRST LEGO Robotics Team, led by Francis Schaeffer and Sarah Carlson-Lier, presented a first run of their upcoming FLL competition material. As part of their stellar work, the team told us about a programming creation of theirs: an “SCC” or “School Carbon Calculator,” a digital module that will allow Waring (and other schools and institutions) to track the energy performance of their buildings. The FLL team has worked closely with Tim Lock, Opal’s principal architect on our passive house project, who is sharing with the team some of the firm’s carefully researched “secret sauce” formulas for energy calculations. This student-driven project is a great example of the new building already becoming a part of who we are and who we aspire to be.

New students were welcomed into the Waring community during a Convocation Ceremony on Saturday, September 21.

What does it mean to be a part of the Waring community? Take a look at this year's Convocation Speeches to learn what it means to members of Waring's senior class, faculty, administration, trustees, and parents. 

My photography origin story began on a trans-America road trip in 2014. Over the course of 30 days, a high school friend and I drove more than 10,000 miles from Maine to California and back, visiting a dozen National Parks along the way. 

The back of our car was packed with hiking and camping gear, a cook stove, ice cooler, and a borrowed Canon T3i digital camera. 

"[The act of watercoloring] made me wonder how this active demonstration would translate to mathematical problem solving and talking through worked out examples this way on a white board." 

On Frost’s Mending Wall and Knowing the Neighbors

by Timothy Bakland '94, Head of School

*All-School Meeting Transcript - April 19, 2019*

Toni Rose: Social Justice lawyer Bryan Stevenson has said, “You can’t demand truth and reconciliation. You have to demand truth; people have to hear it, and then they have to want to reconcile themselves to that truth.”

Gabe: On March 25, 25 Group 1 students and six chaperones journeyed to Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma, Alabama to hear, see, and feel the truth of the Civil Rights Era and its ongoing legacy.

According to mindful.org, mindfulness “is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.” At Waring School, we promote a mindful approach to college counseling.

Mindfulness, in this context, means being fully engaged in the things that really matter during the college admissions process. We encourage our students to think expansively and to imagine that anything is possible. At the same time, we ask them to identify and then focus on what is truly important to them -- what values define them and which ones are evolving.

At Convocation on September 22, we warmly welcomed 31 new students to Waring. What does it mean to be a part of Waring? Take a look at this year's Convocation Speeches to learn what it means to members of Waring's senior class, faculty, administration, and parents.

Dear Waring Community and Friends,

Just over a year ago, the "Waring Way Study Group" (a task-force of the Board of Trustees) commissioned a series of articles to be written over the course of a few years on elements of teaching pedagogy at Waring School -- how our practices both build off of and inform best practices in the larger world.

Dear Waring Community,

We have now just begun our official classes (what most schools would mark as the “start” of year), but we have also just come off a wonderful week at Northwoods Camp in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. This journey into the outdoors is where the Waring year really begins.

From Tim Bakland's remarks at the 2018 Auction: 

In anticipation of this evening’s celebration of Waring’s roots, I had the pleasure of traveling to Tampa, Florida where I spent a day with Philip and Josée, our school’s founders. We spoke at length about the earliest days of the school, La Petite École in Rockport, and then the move here to Beverly.

On December 9, 2017, Waring’s First Lego League Team, the Brick Wolves, headed off to Revere High School for a day of competition. Fourteen nervous students, two teachers (Erin Thomassen and me), along with several parents, and lots of Lego, traveled south from Waring on a cold, snowy, Saturday.

When students are interested in pursuing their education at Waring School, we often times get questions about sports and the level of competition our students participate in. All members of our community are athletes in some way. One of the many beauties of our school is that we offer the novice athlete opportunities to become members of our sports teams, and under the same umbrella, we graduate some of the most competitive athletes on the Northshore. Our end goal is to create an environment here at Waring where being active in sports and activities transcends any school, institution or work place; where being active becomes a mainstay in our alumni’s lives, creating lifelong habits for good health.

Making and doing has been an integral part of Waring’s approach from the early days of the school when a student’s day might include taking care of the goats, woodworking, baking or typesetting, as well as academic work. The opening of the Waring Industrial Park (WIP) this fall is a natural extension of this original vision of experiential, creative learning and gives students space and tools to work on their own projects, as well as the opportunity to participate in new initiatives such as FIRST LEGO League.

While home in Providence for Rosh Hashanah, I saw an elderly family friend in temple who asked me what I was working on. I told her that we were currently rehearsing Radium Girls, and when I started to tell her about it, she nodded and looked at me intently. Then she teared up. She knew the story, and not because she’d Googled “large cast plays for high school students.”

Waring is a school that thrives on the challenge of blending innovation with tradition. The things we do such as, Camping Trip, All-School Meeting, Tutorial, and Soirées are part of our past but equally critical to our future if we are to remain true to our soul and culture as a school. To keep these programs fresh we continually try to think differently about them, cautious of the status quo. All areas of our program are in the constant effort to be innovative with tradition; and one example is the Earth Science Program for Group 1. This fall marks the 15th year of the Singing Beach Project. In that Earth Science helps students understand how the spheres of the land, the ocean, and the atmosphere interact to make our planet function as it does, studying the impact of seasonal weather on the profile of Singing Beach has been a tradition of the Group 1 science for many years. What better place to study to the interaction of land, ocean and weather than the beach?

Please enjoy these Convocation Speeches and pictures from 2017. The full video of the event is available here:

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Waring Parent, professional magazine editor, John Knowles, who discussed what he sees as Waring's value proposition -- what sets Waring apart from other learning institutions. You can view video excerpts here:

We have started our new pilot schedule - a three week period where we are testing out the addition of some more experiential learning. Part of this is on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday where we have a "focus flex" time, during which students are encouraged to read a book, work with a partner on a project, play chess, or participate in any number of other activities.

Recently, during the afternoon following Grandparents & Special Friends Day, the students gathered to clean campus after our big event, to talk about the importance of kindness, and partake in an activity that allowed them to explore a type of art they don't often generate.

This is a guest post by Caroline Baxter, Waring class of 2000, currently a Senior Project Associate at RAND Corporation in Washington, D.C. Caroline was a classmate of mine, and when I wasn't begging her to play one of her amazing piano compositions, I was marveling at her wit and intellect - something that thanks to the miracle of Facebook I am still able to do daily. Huge thanks to Caroline for letting us in on her high powered life for a day... (Becky Schaeffer '00)

Goatscaping: a green solution to managing poison ivy, invasive plants, tough inclines, stone walls, ledge, and overgrown areas.

From the journal of a faculty member:

And then the first car turns up the driveway and the first kid climbs out, lugging a bag half their size and twice their weight and already forgetting something, probably the sleeping bag, so that a parent has to bang open the Volvo’s tailgate and fish it out and hand it over, slippery and overlarge and already escaping from its carrying case, not unlike the parental heart as the kid joins two, three, four other kids--maybe they met three days ago at their first preseason, maybe this preseason was their last and they’ve been in and out of each others’ business for (can it be?) six years--swirling and eddying up the School steps. And you watch the parents drive away and you hear the voices rise and you remember: oh yes, these people, the ones already scuffing the freshly-varnished floor, the ones making all this noise. These are why.

Welcome to the new Waring School Blog!

The school year here on campus is well under way. We've come and gone from Camping Trip, our annual Convocation is in the books, and our visit with our professional goatscapers is over (#goatscaping).