Several students representing Pottsgrove 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, freshmen Natalie Lobello and Tyler Montgomery, sophomores Zachary Rieker and Jacob Schumacher, junior Janine Faust and senior Elizabeth Driehaus all earned near-perfect scores.
Junior Eric Maynard and seniors Brianna Costira, Meganne Natale and Brianna West earned honorable mention at the same time.
The school's participation was overseen by English teacher Todd Kelly.
More than 60,000 high school students from 47 states entered the meet.
The premise of the WordWright challenge is that attentive reading and sensitivity to language are among the most important skills students learn at 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 or as recent as Margaret Atwood's.Thought the texts vary widely in voice, tone, subject and length, they have one thing in common: style.
The texts for the first WordWright meet this year were a short story by Ron Rash for ninth and tenth graders; and an Atlantic Magazine essay by James Parker for 11th and 12th graders.
The students will participate in three more meets over 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment