Education & Faculty

What's Special

Electives Week
The WSSS High School devotes one week of the academic year to Electives Week, a week when faculty and invited guests offer courses outside the regular academic spectrum. Students from grades 8 through 12 are assigned to courses based on student choice as opposed to grade level. Examples of course offerings in the recent past include:

  • The Snow Leopard: While staying in Keene Valley for hiking and snowshoeing, students focused on discussions of Peter Matthiessen's book, The Snow Leopard.

  • 100 Mile Cooking: This course focused on learning to cook two meals each day using only food that can be obtained within 100 miles of Saratoga Springs.

  • Cinema and Image: Each day the students watched a film together in the morning and examined its cinematic qualities through poetry and fiction writing exercises.

  • Arm-of-the-Sea Mask and Puppet Theatre: Students created life-sized puppets, composed music and wrote a theatrical production for a public performance on the topic of Watershed in the Saratoga region. The theatrical presentation was followed by a community dialogue on the topic of Watershed in the area.

You can see a writeup in The Saratogian here.

Internship Program
During the second semester of the academic year, 11th graders foray beyond the boundaries of the school to explore potential career paths. In preparation for the placements, all juniors participate in workshops and lectures on, among other things, effective communication, strengthening connections, and personality types. Immediately following their internship experiences, they deliver public presentations. Recent internship venues have included the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a congressional representative's office in Washington D.C., a public radio station, a lawyer's office, a midwifery practice, an herbalist's garden and the United Nations.

Foreign Language Exchange
(please click for more information)
 
The beauty of the Waldorf School is that it is designed entirely to keep children intact until they are ready to move out into the world as whole individuals.”

– Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of The Magical Child and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg