With spring trimester comes one of the Upper School's most outstanding academic rites of passage: the Junior Writing Seminar. The tradition of this course precedes my twelve years here, dating back to the early 2000s when Colorado Academy developed this trimester-long writing intensive course in which students learn how to compose non-fiction narratives effectively. I have been fortunate enough to teach this particular course a half dozen times during my tenure at CA, and I have always found the experience to be highly rewarding.

The format of the class is similar to the kind of freshman-year seminars found in many colleges: relying on a writers workshop, we ask students to develop their rhetorical skills while also tapping into their creativity and their desire to express themselves through the written word.
In the required assignments students reflect on personal experience: they write about an important place or a significant memory, profile someone in their lives, work up a magazine article on a topic of their choice, deliver a how-to (process) essay, just to name a few of the standard pieces. In the end they create a portfolio of their collected work--around 50 pages of total material--from the trimester, adding a preface in which they reflect on their experience in the course and what they have learned about themselves as writers. Throwing off the proverbial shackles of the traditional analytical essay they are asked to do in their humanities courses, students relish the opportunity to write more expressively, often focusing on one of their favorite topics: themselves! In all seriousness, the course comes at a perfect time for these young men and women, as they are just becoming more comfortable with who they are and how they got to where they are. They are able to examine their inner workings while also standing outside of themselves in a way that leads to truly wonderful writing and some breakthrough personal moments. The results are always engaging, often profound, frequently liberating for these students as they develop their "voice" in writing.

The juniors also do some beneficial reading in the course, turning their attentions to models of effective professional and student writers. John McPhee, Joan Didion, Sherman Alexie, George Orwell, and Annie Dillard are among the many writers whose works provide inspiration and help our students to fine tune their own work. The students are able to dissect these pieces, looking for stylistic choices that enhance the impact on the intended audience. We also bring in working authors and editors who have found ways to make writing central to their careers.

I am amazed at how many recent alums have continued to be writers in some form or fashion in their current careers: recent visitor Kyle Boelte and future guest author Helen Phillips are just two examples. I can also point to Whitney Gaines, Jake Roper, Luke Slattery and Sarah Holland-Batt, who just had the rare honor of having a poem published in the New Yorker. Most of them came through our Junior Writing Seminar program; even if they were here before the class existed, they benefitted tremendously from the emphasis Colorado Academy places on the ability to express oneself through the written word. I am truly excited to read what my students will come up with this trimester!