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.
After a week of solo adventures and visits from adjunct teachers Will Wamaru and former Mountain Classroom instructor Chris Farrell, this update from Mountain Classroom includes two blog posts: Solo Reflections from Camden '21 and North Wash Canyoneering by Cameron '22. Enjoy!
It wouldn’t be altogether spring if there weren’t at least one small tribute to the sport of baseball, that maddeningly slow game that I find altogether addictive and centering. Everyone has their sport weaknesses. Mine just happens to be baseball in the spring, and late yesterday afternoon when I passed Mark Tremblay’s squad running through situational drills I could feel the draw. I just wanted to linger and watch as he slapped balls to the infield and outfield and ran the team through its paces before their games this weekend. Man on first, ball hit to left: where’s the play?
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.”
Buckle up, its a long one… (Not bad, just long)
A collection of memories and stories, laughter and light. Pages full of where you sat and who you met. And yes, the drawings are made up of scribbles and wonky lines. And yes, the colors blend in an unfavorable manner and the pencil smudges in lines across the page. To the eye of a stranger they are idle sketches, quite possibly a collection of nothingness. A graphite mountain stretches a small amount of the papers space, labeled “Mountains at Sunset” and a little frog who looks, mushy?? What could they mean to anyone? Each infantile sketch ignites a memory that would otherwise fade.
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.
