Divine Savior Academy – Doral senior, Isabella Dominguez, recently won high honors in this year’s first WordWright Challenge, a competition for American high school students requiring close reading and analysis of many different kinds of prose and poetry.
Dominguez placed among the 163 highest-scoring twelfth graders in the entire country. More than 70, 000 high school students from 48 states entered the meet. Divine Savior’s participation was overseen by Mr. Kyle Fax, English teacher. “It’s always exciting to see our students make the most of their God-given abilities, even when it isn’t necessarily for a grade in a class. Isa is exactly the type of goal-driven, self-motivated student that I can see making the most out of a unique opportunity to demonstrate her literary and analytical prowess,” says Fax.
The premise behind the WordWright Challenge is that attentive reading and sensitivity to language are among the most important skills students acquire in school. The texts for the first WordWright Challenge this year were an essay by Ian Frazier for 9th and 10th graders and a short story by Katherine Anne Porter, paired with a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, for 11th and 12th graders. Divine Savior students will participate in three more meets over the coming months, and medals and certificates will be awarded in June to those who achieve and/or improve the most over the course of the year.
