Wa-Hi students place 12th in national WordMasters competition

A team of students representing Walla Walla High School recently won highest honors in this years WordMasters Challenge, a national competition for high school students requiring close reading and analysis of many different kinds of prose and poetry. Participating with 572 high school teams from all across the country, the schools eleventh-grade team tied for twelfth place in the nation in the years third meet, held in February. The team was supervised by Julie A. Gaffney.

Several of the schools students who won honors for individual achievement included: Freshman Tory Henderson, sophomores Tom Callister and Jeff Ladderud, juniors Melissa Eastman and Sarah Hicks, and senior Helen Reich. In addition, freshmen Arthur Fretheim and Bethany Wright and seniors Kaori Graybeal and Chris Schulz earned honorable mention. More than 55,000 students from across the country participated in the meet.

The premise behind the WordMasters Challenge is that attentive reading and sensitivity to language are among the most important skills students acquire in school. The questions posed by the WordMasters 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 writers style shapes and shades his meaning. Because the WordMasters 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.