(Gt. Barrington, MA—May 3, 2015) West New York’s
Ambar Grullon, a sophomore at High Tech, has
been accepted into the prestigious Young Writers Workshop at Bard College at
Simon’s Rock, announced Dr. Joseph Giammarella, Principal of High Tech.
Grullon’s
application to the Young Writers Workshop arrived in time to meet the deadline
of April 27th. A sizable
number of applications had arrived at Bard College, precipitating a number of
qualified students placed on the wait list.
Among the applications on file, however, Grullon’s appeared to be the
strongest, according to Jamie Hutchinson, Director of the Young Writers
Workshop.
“[Grullon’s]
personal narrative was well written and [her] teachers' recommendation letters
were glowing,” says Hutchinson. Grullon
submitted a writing sample that presented “a thoughtful account of looking for
a speech to present in [her] seventh grade Forensics class,” Hutchinson
adds. “Overall, we were impressed with
the personal insight, emotional honesty, and verbal clarity of the
writing—things we value in the workshop.”
Simon's Rock began offering three-week writing workshops for
high school students in the summer of 1983.
Now part of the National Writing and Thinking Network,
the largest consortium of summer writing programs in the country, Simon’s Rock
selects eighty-four academically-motivated students to participate in the
program. Unlike conventional workshops in expository and creative writing,
Simon's Rock focuses on informal, playful, expressive writing as a way to
strengthen skills of language and thinking.
From these informal writing activities and techniques of peer response,
students develop polished personal narratives, stories, poems, and exploratory
essays.
The workshop sections, each consisting of twelves students, allow
for individual attention and help to foster a supportive learning community in
which all can feel comfortable exploring new directions in their writing and
thinking. Each weekday consists of three
ninety-minute sessions organized as writing and discussion seminars. Workshop leaders write with their students, with
frequent sharing of informal writing, both in small groups and in the class as
a whole. Texts also frequently serve as
starting points and models for students' creative writing exercises. Evening activities complement this experience
as well, and each week, students develop portfolios of “works in progress,” meeting
individually with their workshop leaders to discuss their writings.
