You can always spot a Fayerweather alum.
They write like they mean it, talk to teachers like people, and do both well past high school.
Our eighth graders leave having written thesis-driven essays in Justice & Dissent and designed their own experiments in a dedicated lab. Many of them have also taken the Unit Play to the Massachusetts Educational Theatre Guild festival. Some of them started here at four. What they take into ninth grade is harder to fit on a transcript. They’ve had years of being known by the adults who taught them, and they’re used to bringing those adults a question or a half-finished draft.
Writing comes up most. Year after year, alums tell us they still use the essay structures they learned here, especially TRIAC. Students report that they feel prepared to make the adjustment to high school scientific writing because of the emphasis we place on it at Fayerweather.
Teachers come up next. Several told us that because they’d known their Fayerweather teachers so well, going to office hours in high school felt normal. Some found ninth-grade history familiar. One said the Unit’s Holocaust course had prepared them for it, and another’s History of Race in the United States class picked up threads from a Unit class on racism. Our students say that they feel more comfortable and prepared to discuss issues of inequity, diversity, and justice than many of their peers in their new high schools.
What they tell us
We check in with our alums every year to hear how they’re doing and how well Fayerweather prepared them for what came next. They’re candid with us.
Getting ready for ninth grade
High school asks different things of students than we do, and the Unit is where we start preparing them for that. Every student in seventh and eighth grade has an advisor who knows them well. Students who are applying to independent schools practice for the SSAT, including the timed, fill-in-the-bubble format many of them haven’t seen before. Unit electives follow a set sequence and pace, much closer to how a ninth-grade course runs.
Finding the next school
Molly O’Connor, our Next Schools Advisor, starts meeting with students and families in seventh grade. Together they work out what kind of high school makes sense for each child, whether that’s the public school down the street, an independent day school or boarding. She stays with families through applications, including the essays, and through the final decision.
In ninth grade
- Math: Most graduates place into Geometry or Algebra 2.
- Spanish: Graduates finish Spanish 1 in eighth grade and place into Spanish 1, Spanish 1 Honors or Spanish 2. A few go higher.
Founded in 1967, Fayerweather is an all-gender independent private school enrolling students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade and located in Cambridge, MA. Children here are taken seriously — as thinkers, as individuals, as people whose presence in the world already matters. They learn by doing real things, in real places, for real audiences. They become themselves, in community, over time.
