Pottsgrove Students Shine in Reading Challenge

Blogger's Note: The following was provided by the Pottsgrove School District.
Two teams of Pottsgrove High School students recently won high honors in this year’s final WordWright Challenge of the academic year. Participating with 693 school teams across the country, Pottsgrove’s eleventh graders tied for thirteenth place in the nation, while our seniors tied for fourteenth in the nation.

Pottsgrove senior and class Valedictorian, Paul Sachs was one of the 12 highest ranked twelfth graders in the country in the year-end cumulative standings.

Pottsgrove students who achieved perfect scores were juniors Simon Lapic and Brenna Mayberry. The students were supervised by Todd Kelly.

The premise behind WordWright Challenge is that attentive reading and sensitivity to language are among the most important skills students acquire in school. 

The tests 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 James Parker’s cultural commentary in The Atlantic. 

Though the texts vary widely in voice, 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 the 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 tests 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 fourth WordWright meet this year were a pair of poems by Philip Booth and Alastair Reid for 9th and 10th graders and a short story by Michael Chabon for 11th and 12th graders.