Congratulations to Senior goalkeeper Jeannie Woller, who was just named the 2A Women’s soccer MVP by the Salt Lake Tribune. Jeannie led the Ravens to a 2A title this year. There is a great article about her on the Tribune website. She and five of her teammates (Caroline Coats ’15, Jamie Duke ’12, Grace Sponaugle ’15, Mistu Miyashima ’13, and Kristen Johnsen ’12) were named to the 2011 All-State teams.
[Photo credit: Leah Hogsten/Salt Lake Tribune]
By Deanna Williams, Lower Schools Director
This year I was able to visit the Musee des Arts et Métiers in Paris, France. This museum houses the Foucault pendulum, a simple device conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the rotation of the earth. This giant pendulum, swinging forward and marking time, reminded me of our own school year and how quickly time escapes all of us. The colorful display of leaves and the peppering of white snow upon the mountaintops speak to all; school is in full swing and the beginning has been steady, true, and marked with confidence from teachers, students, and parents alike.
We delight in the rigor of the Waterford day. The intellectual engagement that requires a learner to stretch beyond their comfort zone is an activity that we promote and desire for all of our students. Students need to think, exert effort, and persist to be successful. Our Waterford students need both rigor and complexity in their learning. Bloom’s Taxonomy is a tool that educators use to consider rigor when developing questions or designing learning tasks. At the higher end of this taxonomy are questions that require of students more sophisticated thinking. Trigger words that might be used in questioning activities are: compare/contrast, analyze, deduce, imagine, elaborate, hypothesize, and generate.
read more…
Here’s a special treat: a visit with our whip-smart, one-of-a-kind English Department Chair (we found her huddled behind a pile of essays).
Mary Powers grew up in New York, mostly in White Plains, a Westchester county suburb. She lived in a 3-generation household, with her parents and maternal grandparents, and attended, as she describes it, “the ominously named Our Lady of Sorrows.” At 15, her family moved to Utah and she did her last 2 years of high school at Judge. She says that she arrived here as a punk rocker, with mini-skirt and combat boots, listening to the Clash, while her peers were listening to Marshall Tucker and Pure Prairie League… After high school, Mary ran back east to Harvard, and earned Bachelor’s degrees in English and American Literature and Language — and — Psychology and Social Relations. This was, as she says, quite possibly the longest if not the most prestigious degree that institution could award.
What kind of work did you do before you came to Waterford?
I worked in residential treatment, then got an M.S.S.W. at Columbia University School of Social Work, and an M.Ed. in Special Education from Bank Street College. I kept doing clinical practice in residential treatment, mostly with teenaged girls, then moved out here with 3 boys under the age of 5 and didn’t work for money for a while.
By Nancy Heuston, Head of School
As the November days shorten and the mountains lighten with snow, we anticipate with pleasure the holidays just ahead.
As I consider the holiday traditions that have accumulated in our family, I remember from whence they came. Our Thanksgiving dinner replicates to a surprising degree the dinners that I pulled my chair up to when I was a child — first, at the children’s table (which was always decorated far more colorfully than the adults’) and finally at the Big Table, with my father at the head, carving the turkey.
As important as the traditional menu was the coming together. We dressed up and minded our manners. Parents and grandparents conversed and inevitably the talk turned to reminiscences. The stories never changed, nor did the arms that reached out to hold me tight. Predictably my grandfather fell asleep in the wing chair, thus christening it as ‘Pop’s Chair’. Oblivious to the St. Bernard in the kitchen clearing the countertops of food left too near the edge, three generations settled in by the fire in the great stone fireplace, listening to family tales of times past.
read more…A selection of recent images from the Waterford community:
Pajama Day! Photo: Andrea Reynolds
