Mountain Classroom director, and former instructor, Annie MacKenzie shares the story of how one Proctor Academy family's life was shaped by Mountain Classroom.
The other day, someone asked me to explain the magic that is Mountain Classroom. My first thought was that Proctor Academy's Mountain Classroom changes student’s lives. However, knowing that in my gut is one thing, proving it is another. Here’s some proof.
Students are on break and campus is quiet. Really quiet. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly life at a boarding school shifts from the controlled chaos of the academic year to complete silence during vacations. Campus is grey, and clinging to patches of snow after an unseasonably warm holiday. Since our classrooms are quiet, today's blog post looks back at a post from last fall on "A Maker Education". Enjoy!
Girls' basketball coach Liz McNamara's family dairy farm, McNamara Dairy, helped organize a fundraising event to benefit The Upper Valley Haven in White River Junction. The girls' basketball team jumped right in to help out, making a world of difference in hundreds of families' lives this holiday season.
Proctor Academy's 2500 acres of woodlands are one of our most prized possessions. This diverse ecological habitat spans from the top of Ragged Mountain to the Blackwater River and is home to one of Proctor’s most dynamic classrooms.
Attitude is everything: a lesson from Wednesday.
It rained Tuesday night, drumming on the roof, chewing into the snow, and turning December dreary. It turned Ward Lane into a luge run as I skittered down for an early morning run on Wednesday. I looped behind the baseball field backstop and dropped down to the rail trail, a mealy path in dawn’s light. The Blackwater River, which had flooded just a few days before, whispered within its banks, inching upwards again, and at Bridge Street I turned left, then left again to the hayfield.
This, I grumbled to myself, is not a winter wonderland.
The theme that runs throughout the term on Mountain Classroom is borders: physical borders, emotional borders, cultural borders, ethical borders. Proctor's Mountain Classroom program enters its third week of the term after a recent trip to the Akwesasne Reservation in northern New York state bordering Canada.
As we have known for years at Proctor given our five term-long off-campus programs, a 'classroom' can be anywhere learners gather. Today we provide a brief window (literally thanks to Livestream!) into one of our classrooms where Tom Morgan's Ecological Literature class joined Adam Jones' Globalization class to discuss overlaps in their curricula. This collaborative approach proved fruitful for both classes.
Proctor's first social media photo contest ends this week! For the past week, students, faculty, staff, parents, and alumni have shared photos of Proctor people, places, and programs through social media reminding us what talented artists we have in our community!
It’s one of the tricky issues that – from middle school to college campus – parents and educators have to navigate. It’s not an issue that goes away. The drugs change, the delivery mechanism change, the culture shifts, the laws evolve. The only thing that hasn’t changed is simply this: the worry. It’s the single constant in this landscape.
And the landscape is cause for concern.
Our days as educators at Proctor are varied. We start in the classroom, move seamlessly to advisory period or assembly, and have the opportunity for informal conversations related to our work and our lives with students and colleagues during lunch. Following afternoon class, we head to the athletic fields and afternoon programs. Our time there is different than that which we spend in the classroom; our focus more immediate on the next game, performance, or contest. But should it be?
Mountain Classroom, Proctor's longest running off-campus program, began in 1974 when David Fowler, Chris Norris and others leading the school at the time were bold enough to augment Proctor's educational model (watch more about this evolution as a school). Forty years and hundreds of Mountain Classroom alums later, lives have been transformed by the experience, including those of current Mountain Classroom instructors Peter Logan '01 and Coco Loehr '08. Now it is their turn to transform lives!
Proctor Academy science teacher, Sue Houston, writes today's Academic Lens, allowing us a window into her science classroom!
Assembly occurs in the middle of the academic day three days a week. Some are filled with announcements; others are highlighted by student performances or reflective thoughts from faculty. Friday’s assembly had a slightly different tone.
Creativity.
Earlier this week I took the piece down from the mantel, blew a thin layer of dust off, and carried it over to my office. Carefully. On the bottom, scripted in silver ink, Zada had written several years ago, “This took me 10,000 hours to make.” It was a joke of course, but not really. Back a few years everyone was talking about 10,000 hours, ten years, the time it takes to become really, really good at something. Ceramics. Baseball. The Piano. Golf. Chemistry. Writing.
As educators, our role as learners never stops. We have never ‘arrived’ as experts in the disciplines we teach. We are a part of the learning process as much as our students are, and therefore, we model the same attitude toward learning we encourage in our students. Monday was the perfect opportunity within departments to press pause and dig deeply into our work through professional development.
Do you like beauty? Do you like making beautiful things? Can you envision looking out the window at rolling French countryside and hearing the clickety-clack of a train?
