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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

On Frost’s Mending Wall and Knowing the Neighbors

by Timothy Bakland '94, Head of School

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.

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.

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:

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.