Each time campus empties for a vacation, we are reminded that our students’ presence in our lives fuels our work as educators. This place is just not the same without their energy and enthusiasm pulsing through the community. We are teachers and coaches and advisors and dorm parents only because they are our students, players, advisees, and dorm residents. We are because they are.
Operating on a trimester system with each term fully independent of the prior, the start of a term provides a new beginning for our community. With nearly a quarter of the student body transitioning to or from an off-campus program (roughly 85 students), grade books reset to zero and we work to recenter ourselves around who we want to be as individuals living within a community.
So much of the Proctor experience focuses on the individual student and their path through Proctor; no two students have an identical Proctor journey given the number of classes, off-campus programs, afternoon programs, and individualized attention provided. And yet, these individual journeys take place within the context of the Proctor community. We must never fall victim to the fallacy that individual actions exist in a vacuum. Our actions as individuals and as a community are codependent on each other. The individual experience is only possible because of the community experience, and the community we love is only possible because of the individuals who belong to it.
In THIS article, author Mercedes Valmisa shares powerful insights into our interwoven nature as beings. She writes, “We are co-constituted, co-acted and co-dependent on others – from the air we breathe to the ground that affords our walking. If we start seeing the world like this, it has the potential to make things much better for the many life forms that inhabit this planet.” Valmisa continues, “If we acknowledge the extent to which human agency is distributed across a diverse field of actors, then we can’t keep acting as if we’re fully autonomous and independent individuals. We are radically not self-reliant; we must rely on the agency of things, their behavior and affordances, their efficacy and propensity.”
This philosophy aligns with wisdom offered by JR White Hat ‘00 during last spring’s Earth Day celebrations. JR implored our students to use their voice for good and to seek and appreciate the interrelatedness of all species on Earth. Mitakuye Oyasin in Lakota translates to “we are all related”, and it is through this lens of interconnectedness that we must make decisions in our own lives.
Our individual actions impact others, and as a community, we are the sum of our individual actions. We must each take ownership of that responsibility, recognizing that we are not individuals who are part of a community, we are the community.
