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When students graduate from Living Wisdom School, how well do they do in high school and college?
Gary: It’s a question we’re asked regularly — how our children, our graduates, are prepared for the next step, which is the transition to high school.
Our graduates have attended Harker, Menlo, St. Francis, Bellarmine, Woodside Priory - the most rigorous high schools in the Bay Area.
We have a wall of testimonial letters from our graduates. When they return to visit us, we always ask them, “How did you do? Did we prepare you well? Were you ready for the rigors of high school?” And they do wonderfully well. They do fine.
One of our students who graduated last year was accepted at Woodside Priory, based almost entirely on his interview. The interviewer was very impressed with this boy, based on his interview. And we attributed that to his training in theater - that he could hold himself well and talk to an adult in a way that made such a favorable impression that he was accepted. We have dozens of similar stories about our graduates.
We also have statistics on our graduates’ high school grade point averages that spell out how well they do. They’re in honor programs, they take AP courses, and they graduate from college. A student from our school is now at UC Berkeley, majoring in physics, and another is at UC Berkeley working on a double major in art and political science.
We have a recent graduate who’s now at Stanford University where he’s doing well and playing baseball. When this boy was accepted at Stanford, he made a point of calling Living Wisdom School to thank us for preparing him. I imagine most kids call their high school, but Living Wisdom School had such a profound impact on this boy that he called and thanked Helen specifically for preparing him. Our graduates very often come back and rave about Helen’s preparation in language arts, and thank her for teaching them to write well.
One of our recent graduates is exceptional, though he isn’t completely outside the norm. He was the first student in the history of Woodside Priory who was allowed to take calculus in his freshman year, because he had already finished Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2, and Trigonometry at Living Wisdom. The teacher immediately recognized that he needed to go into the advanced calculus class as a freshman. By February he had already finished the year’s curriculum, and the school is now wrestling with what to do next for this boy.
Another LWS graduate is at Gunn High in Palo Alto, where he’s in the most advanced math course that they offer to freshmen, Algebra 2/Trigonometry. He was allowed to take the class based on his SAT scores and his entrance exam score.
In addition to academics, I believe that our school prepares the children in other important ways - through our field trip experiences, through our theater program, and through the school culture of kindness. They also work with energy, and exercise will power. They are held accountable in many ways, so that when they get to high school, they’re ready to meet others and find their place.
Some students struggle in the beginning at LWS, because it takes them a while to integrate what we’re trying to teach them here. But when they get to high school, they do superbly - 4.0’s at charter schools, for example. With some of the kids, it isn’t immediately obvious that they are talented - they aren’t obviously gifted students, but they go on to do stellar things. Our students’ successes are real - they’re not make-believe.
Barbara: We have solid evidence that the children are well prepared and ready for the best high schools in the San Francisco Area. We’ve been able to follow our graduates’ progress since the school was started, 18 years ago, so the prognosis for our children is no longer a matter of hope and speculation, or what we think we understand about educational methods. It is the children’s actual accomplishments.
They’re very well prepared. In fact, their preparation for the future is something we consider deeply, from preschool on. Our teachers are thoroughly conversant with grade-level equivalency and the California standards. If a child is in second grade at Living Wisdom School, for example, our teachers know where the child stands academically, compared to children elsewhere in the US — so that if the child were to move to New York or Chicago, we could assure the parents of the child’s competency for public or private school. We wouldn’t really be a viable alternative, if we weren’t able to provide that basic information.
Q: When you say they’re performing at grade level, does that mean they take standardized tests?
Barbara: We have done some standardized testing over the years, but not lately, because we’ve found that it simply prepares children to live with testing. We do a tremendous job of preparing them for testing, though we use methods we feel are superior to simply having them take tests.
Many skills are involved in being prepared for a test, and those skills aren’t automatic; they’re learned skills. With something as small as a little spelling test in first or second grade, or a timed test in math, we talk with the children about how to be prepared.
We use many of the techniques that the children learn in the classroom, such as being aware of the power of breathing to calm the mind, and how calming oneself can dispel fear. We also help them discover many ways to approach the material on a test.
These are incredibly valuable skills, and we teach them with a warm heart and a light touch. We also provide the children with information about the gravity of testing, and the rules that generally go along with tests. We want them to be prepared to move anywhere and face a testing situation without nerves or tears or worry. It’s something we’ve emphasized in our school from the start.
Helen: It’s a considered decision on the part of the faculty, and it comes out of the school culture of testing and pressure in academics here in Silicon Valley. We understand the need for testing, but we’ve chosen to face it differently, and equip our children with a different model for learning. Not learning for the sake of getting a high grade, but for understanding something new and exciting and interesting, and doing one’s best. Because we find that the best way to prepare for testing is to achieve a high level of competence in the subject and enthusiasm for it.
This touches on the culture that pervades our school. Our children transition from taking spelling, math, and reading tests in the early grades, to taking national tests in middle school. In math, for example, our middle schoolers participate in the American Mathematics Competition (AMC) and the Math Olympiads for Elementary and Middle Schools. In Language Arts, they take the WordMasters Challenge.
So while Barbara talked about the proof being in the pudding, and how well the children do after they leave us, it’s also important to know that they do very well, in measurable ways, while they’re here. For such a small school, it’s remarkable how many kids, every year, are operating in the 96th, 97th, 98th, and 99th percentile on the national tests.
The WordMasters Challenge requires children to solve analogies. It’s extremely helpful when they leave LWS, because similar analogies crop up in entrance exams for private high schools, and on the SATs. They are amazingly sophisticated — they would stump many adults. We teach the children strategies for solving the analogies, which involve not only understanding vocabulary, but roots, usage, and context.
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