Emerson Waldorf High School senior, Bo Marchman, has been named a National Merit Scholarship semi-finalist.  He was chosen on the basis of his results on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT), which students take during their junior year, and will compete with the other semi-finalists for scholarships to be announced in the spring.

Although most other students taking the PSAT in North Carolina have been taking standardized tests since elementary school, the PSAT was the first standardized test Bo had ever taken in his life.  He has attended the Emerson Waldorf School for the past 14 years, beginning in Kindergarten, and Emerson is exempt from the North Carolina standardized testing requirements.  Instead, teachers follow the internationally recognized Waldorf curriculum and evaluate students’ progress based on check-lists derived from that curriculum.  Movement, practical activities, and the arts are fully integrated into the academic curriculum throughout the grades. 

Bo joins a growing list of Emerson High School students who have excelled on the PSATs and SATs, without being taught  “to the tests” — putting paid to arguments that children need to practice taking standardized tests in order to excel. “We are thrilled for Bo and for our school” says Emerson Administrator, Joanne Andruscavage, “It is a testimony to the strength of the Waldorf approach that while we do not teach in an atmosphere of standardized tests, our students do well on the SATs anyway.

Bo is certainly a well-rounded student. He plays the guitar (recently performing at various venues around town with the Emerson String Singers), and, as a hobby, builds his own stomp boxes and guitar pedals. He is a Life Scout, working toward Eagle. He plays soccer and Cross Country for his school, and on weekends can be found contra-dancing with the Triangle Country Dancers. This diversity of interests has been supported throughout his career at the Emerson Waldorf School, where he has learned to knit, sew, carve a spoon, build a stool, sing and play an instrument, paint, draw, sculpt, juggle, ride a unicycle, walk on stilts, and more, following the Waldorf Educational model which believes in teaching ‘the whole child’.  Bo hopes to attend college next year “somewhere in New England”: he wants to see a different part of the country, having spent all of his life so far in the South.