Waldorf High School is an invigorating place.

We invite you to walk through our doors on any weekday morning. Classes start with the Main Lesson at 8:45 a.m. You might find a group of ninth graders playing poker in Combinations and Permutations and discussing how many hands beat a pair of sevens. Out in the parking lot, the tenth graders are putting trigonometry to use to measure the height of the school building. The juniors are in the lab drawing twigs as they prepare for a field trip to identify trees in winter. The seniors are also out in the parking lot, journals in hand and mud on their boots. They've just returned from an early morning walk around Walden Pond where they wrote in solitude on the banks of the pond, reflecting on the writings of Thoreau and Emerson for their Main Lesson class on the Transcendentalists. All our students spend the first hour and half of each day immersed in the study of Main Lessons, a rich array of academic explorations.

During a 10-minute break following Main Lessons, the halls fill with students and teachers. A group heads to the student lounge for a snack. A teacher and senior discuss his film in progress about tide pools. The Fine Arts teacher pauses on his way to class to tell the History teacher how Vermeer pinpricked his canvas to guide his use of perspective. Someone is improvising the song "Fly Me to the Moon" on a guitar, practicing for jazz ensemble later that day.

At 10:30 A.M., classes begin for our year-long courses. The ninth-grade Spanish students have created collages of random items found in a trash can, imagining the family that owned and filled up that container. Now they are presenting, in Spanish, to their classmates what they imagine the family likes to eat, what their hobbies are, where they go on vacation, and more. In tenth grade Global Studies, a student has chosen to research Chinese wedding customs and has baked a Chinese wedding cake to share with her class. The juniors can be seen in Math class, poring over their Excel spreadsheets and comparing the cost data for proposed exotic senior trip destinations. The seniors are engaged in a spirited discussion of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying in English class.

At 11:55 A.M., the Student Council convenes over lunch to collate and discuss the results of a survey of student interests they have conducted. Meanwhile, in Spanish Club, the students are eating lunch together and practicing their conversation skills. The yearbook student photographer is shooting candids of the lunch-hour scene, while the Social Committee meets to plan the prom. Some students head to the gym for a pick-up game of basketball, while others walk to the pizza place in nearby Waverley Square. One sits under the awning on our front steps, absorbed in the pages of Doctor Zhivago.

On this day, the faculty also meets during lunch. The guidance counselor leads an ongoing study of adolescent development and behavior. The meeting ends just in time for clean-up period--the last ten minutes of lunch when assigned student teams tackle clean up of common areas. On another day, teachers surprise the students at noon with a Fat Tuesday Carnival potluck lunch in the auditorium, and announce a rare afternoon off from classes so that the whole school may go bowling together.

Afternoons at Waldorf begin at 12:55 P.M., and keep their own tempo with the beat of art and music mixed in with academic classes. The Fine Arts studio is dark as a slide projector throws a photograph of an old tobacco barn in Havana on the blackboard. A student lines up lengths of string along the roof and foundation and extends them across the board, determining where they meet. In this lesson on perspective and vanishing points, the students compare their drawings of the barn to the lines they now see on the board. Another group sketches the hallway, holding up their pencils at angles in front of their faces, seeing for the first time how the lines between ceiling and walls on either side appear to converge at an unseen point in front of them, somewhere beyond the building. From another studio, the sound of deliberate scraping and scratching and smoothing emanates. It is a stone sculpture class, where students apply rasps and chisels to coax forms from stone. In silk painting, they spread brilliant color on strips of white silk stretched on wooden racks.

On one day, chorus has begun. Strains of Ladysmith Black Mumbazo's song "Homeless" and "Seasons of Love" wind through the school. On another day, just after lunch, the music ensembles - classical, jazz, recorder, and guitar - meet to practice. At one end of the building one might hear the Beatles' "Something in the Way She Moves," and then a few steps further down the hall, one might hear a very loud clarinet dominating its chamber music group.

Afternoons at Waldorf are also devoted to educating bodies, muscles and bones. With their P.E. teacher, the ninth and tenth grades jump on a school bus to go to the Woburn YMCA where they take classes in swimming, fitness development, aerobics, gymnastics, dance, weight training, and rock climbing. In our own gym, juniors and seniors work up a sweat by learning funk and hip hop moves in dance class. 

At 3:05 P.M., classes end at Waldorf High School. The Comets, our girls and boys basketball teams, accompanied by many enthusiastic supporters, load up the team bus and head off for a game. Two students have cornered their math teacher in the computer lab and are getting some extra help with their geometry. A senior is hurrying to get to his after-school job at a child-care center on time. Another is on her way to do some community service at a program for substance abusers in Cambridge. While they're waiting for their rides home, another group of students has congregated in the parking lot. They laugh easily and often. A game of catch with a football starts, a car door opens and thuds shut: "See you." "Bye."