WordWright Challenge - Two WHS students receive High Honors

Congratulations to two of Waldwick High School's finest Julia Montella and Brianna Fleming on receiving high honors in this year's WordWright Challenge.  

Press Release

Two students representing Waldwick High School recently won high honors in this year's WordWright Challenge, a competition for American high school students requiring close reading and analysis of many different kinds of prose and poetry.

In the year's first meet, held in October, senior Julia Montella, who made only two mistakes, placed among the 104 highest-scoring twelfth graders in the entire country. At the same time, freshman Brianna Fleming placed among the 159 highest-scoring ninth graders nationwide. More than 58,000 students from 46 states (and four foreign nations) entered the meet. The students' participation was overseen by Amy Baskin and Liz Getlik.

The premise behind the WordWright Challenge is that attentive reading and sensitivity to language are among the most important skills students acquire in school. The texts students must analyze for the Challenge can range from short fiction by Eudora Welty or John Updike to poetry as old as Shakespeare's or as recent as Margaret Atwood's, and to essays as classic as E. B. White's or as current as a Time Magazine essay by James Poniewozik. Though the texts vary widely in voice, subject, tone, and length, they have one thing in common: style. All use language skillfully to convey layers and shades of meaning not always apparent to students on a first or casual reading. Like the questions on the verbal SAT I, the SAT II in English Literature, and the Advanced Placement exams in both English Language and English Literature, the questions posed by the WordWright Challenge ask students both to recognize the emotional and/or rational logic of a piece of writing and to notice the ways in which a writer's style shapes and shades his meaning. Because the WordWright Challenge is a classroom activity and not a college-entrance exam, however, it can be a learning experience, not just a high hurdle. After completing a Challenge, classes are encouraged to talk about the texts and the answers to the multiple-choice questions, and are also given additional topics for open-ended discussion and/or written response.

The texts for the first WordWright meet this year were a short story by John Updike for 9^th and 10^th graders and a poem by Philip Larkin for 11^th and 12^th graders. The students will participate in three more meets in the coming months, and medals and certificates will be awarded in June to those who achieve and/or improve the most in the course of the year.