The Waverly School

One of our fourth grade students made this sign to welcome prospective families to her classroom. She read it aloud to a tour group yesterday.  It’s always so exciting to know how much the children here love their school. This student’s mom says, ” She’s an excellent promoter of Waverly as she keeps telling us  [...]

All eleventh graders at Waverly take a This I Believe class, intended to develop mindfulness and self-awareness while also helping them to foster their writing and public speaking skills.  I was invited to participate by composing and reading  my own This I Believe essay with the  class. Feeling grateful for this place, I am happy [...]

The Waverly School arrived in my life like some sort of granted wish.  It’s as if I willed it and its staff into existence from my most pie-in-the-sky hopes for my children’s education. Once we had children, I started panicking about the state of public education, and started daydreaming about some impossible alternative.  What I [...]

Two summers ago, I felt the need to see what all the fuss regarding the Stephanie Meyers Twilight series was about, as so many of my students were abuzz with obsessive fandom or vitriolic criticism—or sometimes, strangely, both. I opened the first novel, and two weeks, three books, and 1,700 pages later, came up for [...]