The Buzz

For the past fifteen years, Proctor’s Mountain Bike team has been at the center of the sport’s boom at the high school level in New England (read more about the rise of mountain biking in New England here). Now with nearly thirty teams from Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts competing weekly, the Northern New England Mountain Bike league has become a mecca for high school cyclists in the Northeast with more than 400 riders competing each week. At Saturday’s league championships hosted by Gould Academy, Proctor earned second place overall as a team and garnered a number of first place individual honors.

Friday night’s tech free camping excursion to Elbow Pond, organized by Assistant School Leader Sarah Ferdinand ‘18, foreshadowed a massive power outage throughout the morning on Monday. A powerful Nor’Easter hit New England overnight Sunday into Monday, knocking out power to more than half the state of New Hampshire.

The nearly 72 hours of relative quiet that the past long-weekend provides is cherished by both students and adults in the Proctor community. The brief respite following Fall Family Weekend in the midst of an otherwise chaotic fall affords an opportunity to catch up on sleep, laundry, or that long-overdue run in the lingering foliage of late October. Each October, we hunger for this intentional time for reflection prior to the final stretch of the Fall Term. 

Midterm grades are due tomorrow as we look ahead to Fall Family Weekend and yet another beautiful stretch of weather. As we prepare for the weekend, we want to share with our families a complete guide to the weekend's festivities and a few pieces of advice. Read more below! 

Today’s Ninth Grade Hike to the Proctor Cabin is a moment early in the school year where we take ownership of our school culture and teach our students what is most important to us: trusting relationships, connection to the wilderness, exercise, community and the ability to talk candidly with those around you. This tradition of hiking to the Proctor Cabin as a class began in 2011, and has quickly grown into a fun, culture shaping opportunity for our youngest, most energetic, inquisitive students.

Coaching, teaching, advising, and working with adolescents energizes each of us. It's why we decided to work at Proctor and to choose education as a career path. But, as any educator will tell you, sometimes the rhythm of the school year becomes a bit too familiar and routine starts to squeeze out joy. Saturday’s Special Olympics Fun Day was just what we all needed on a foggy Saturday morning in early October.

As students settle into a rhythm within their academic classes, our hope is they become increasingly willing to take risks, to speak out, pursue a line of thinking, and embrace failure as a step in the right direction. This desired academic vulnerability take times to emerge as its foundation rests in a mutual trust among students and teacher, but as we approach the mid-point in the Fall Term, we look to the collaborative work being done within our English and Social Science departments as an example of what risk taking should look like in the classroom.

As we approach the end of September, students have navigated their first major assessments in their classes and have settled into a rhythm at Proctor. This week and into next, parents, advisors, dorm parents, coaches, and students will begin to receive the first Official Notes from classroom teachers reflecting on these first few weeks of class. The short, informative comments included in these notes provide insights to each student’s recent performance in class, but more importantly, serve as the foundation of an on-going narrative we use to engage students in reflection upon their own growth.