Every year, right around the time of the book fair, Waverly teach­ers are asked to create wish lists for books to be read in their class­rooms. So while the teach­ers are think­ing about books and liter­a­ture, Jen took the oppor­tu­nity to ask what every­one is currently reading. This is always a fasci­nat­ing peek into the secret reading lives of faculty and staff!

One of my goals this year is to read all the assigned books my son Sam will be reading in his senior English seminar courses. This semes­ter, he is taking Crash and Clash of Cultures, which is taught in conjunc­tion with the history class called State of the World. Both classes explore themes of moral­ity, violence, poverty and wealth, popu­la­tion issues, glob­al­iza­tion, immi­gra­tion, and corpo­rate capi­tal­ism from a liter­ary stand­point, and they look at the age-old and ageless responses to the idea that cultures clash and crash.

It began on a cool day in the late winter of 2005. My son, Harry, and I were much younger when Harry made his first visit to Waverly as an appli­cant for the preschool. We drove to Pasadena, a drive we ended up making approx­i­mately 4,480 times over the next 13 years.

One of our young alumnas, Shelby Ottengheime ​’18, has had an adven­tur­ous first year at Pitzer College.

This week’s post is from an email sent to Waverly’s art teacher, Michelle Dakan, from Anne Schiller, a colleague and friend from Pacific Oaks.

Nature has always been an inte­gral part of my life. As a wee child, my mother brought me to Drumlin Farm, where I watched the foxes and the wild birds with the rapt atten­tion only a three-year-old can manage. I grew up hiking through the woods owned by the water company.

It seems slightly obvious to say some­thing about how impor­tant the concept of ​“commu­nity” is at a school. School, ideally, is a series of various inter­act­ing commu­ni­ties: parent, teacher, class, campus. Nothing ground­break­ing here. But, see, we’re not talking just school, we’re talking Waverly. And as you might have expe­ri­enced in your time here, we’re a little…different. I can’t even say why, exactly. It’s just there, that feeling.

When I came to Waverly for the first time five years ago, it was the last prospec­tive school on my long tour list. I didn’t know what to call what I was looking for exactly at these highly varied campuses for my two daugh­ters, so I toured as many schools as I could.