Thirty days. After bouncing in and out of quarantine and waiting for a full cast and crew to finally be available, Proctor’s Drama Department had less than thirty days to rehearse for this spring’s production of Mamma Mia!. But if you have the opportunity to watch the production live during the next four nights, odds are you would never know how compressed a rehearsal schedule this group navigated. The show is energetic, spunky, loud, funny, and clever, and as is always the case with Proctor’s theater productions, a reminder of how talented our students and faculty are. 

During Monday's assembly we recognized underclass award recipients. While every student deserves considerable recognition for making it through a Covid-19 year, the students recognized today demonstrated consistent excellence in their respective disciplines. Congratulations to the award recipients below. 

Starting with Wilderness Orientation, Proctor students are immersed in a hands-on, experiential learning adventure that includes on-campus courses, off-campus programs, Project Period, and a myriad of skills courses. Students come to understand the value of stepping outside their comfort zones in the pursuit of learning. Senior Project provides a culminating two and a half week immersive learning opportunity for seniors to design their own learning experience centered around their passions or areas of interest.

We spend an inordinate amount of our mental and emotional bandwidth working to align ourselves with our stated identities. Society repeatedly asks us to make declarative “I am” statements on surveys, medical intake forms, or social media profiles. In doing so, we risk becoming an identity that is as much shaped by others as ourselves. “I am white.” “I am married.” “I am employed at Proctor.” 

Last week, as assistant athletic director Trish Austin ‘01 was cleaning out the athletic storage area in anticipation of construction starting on Phase 4 of the Farrell Field House project, she came across a Proctor Woodlands Trail map from the mid-1980s. 

In September we published THIS blog post discussing the term acedia and its ancient roots that aptly describe the situation in which we have found ourselves in over the past thirteen months: listlessness, undirected anxiety, and inability to concentrate. At the end of the Fall Term, we shared thoughts on emotional agility and the need to come to terms with the complexity of that which we were experiencing. Over the weekend, The New York Times published an article titled, Feeling: It’s Called Languishing in which the author, Adam Grant, describes the joyless and aimless state that has besieged so many of us over the past year. We are inundated with messages seeking to help us make sense of this chapter of our lives. 

Over the next week we will honor the Proctor Woodlands through a series of activities, videos, hikes, live classes, and messages from members of the Proctor community. Kicking off with today’s global celebration of Earth Day and culminating on Proctor’s celebration of Earth Day on April 29, this weeklong Woodlands Challenge will celebrate our connection to land, while generating support for a new educational center that will serve as a gateway to Proctor’s 2,500 acres of land. 

 As our group has experienced these past few days, things don’t always go as planned. This past week we have experienced lots of mechanical issues with both our bus, Deb, and our trailer, Rocinante. Deb has taught us to be flexible with plans and make these times fun for ourselves.