We each live in a bubble. Some of our bubbles are bigger than others as the experiences we live expand world views. Our goal as educators at Proctor is to afford each of our students the opportunity to make sure they graduate having a vastly larger bubble than when they first arrived on campus.
European Art Classroom ends their studies in Holland, The Netherlands, Les Pays-Bas. If you want to see art works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh and so many others, it is a must visit. The city of Amsterdam is famous for other reasons too as we know, but it never fails to shock the American visitor.
The tumble of the year has been reduced to days. Not too long ago backpacks were lined up in the cage and the first nervous moments of the year played out on Wilderness Orientation. In September we checked weather reports to see if we would be sleeping in the rain, and now we check to see if graduation will be on a clear day. How did it happen so quickly? Are we done so soon? The questions begin to swirl for all of us.
Members of Proctor’s AP Environmental Science, Engineering, Physics, and Entrepreneurship classes joined together for a celebration of innovation at Proctor Tuesday evening. More than a dozen student groups presented their research, business plans, solar oven constructions, and rocket designs to the community in the Wise Center and English classrooms of Maxwell Savage Hall. The evening’s presentations were a powerful reminder of the quality and depth of the project based learning taking place in Proctor’s classrooms.
For more than sixty years, Proctor Academy students have built boats in the school's woodshops. Originally, the building of these boats was a necessity for those students wishing to take part in Proctor's sailing team that competed in regatas around New England throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. In recent decades, the building of boats in the Alan Shepherd Boat House is a rite of passage for many students looking to craft their own vessle. For Doug Park '01, his passion for boat building fostered at Proctor in the woodshop and aboard the Harvey Gamage on Ocean Classroom led to a career working on wooden boats for Redd's Pond Boatworks.
Look across any of the practice fields or the tennis courts and you know they are here. Arms swing, heads shake, faces are slapped as the pesky scourge of spring arrives in New Hampshire. I’ve read somewhere that there are over 1,800 species of black flies, but most of us could care less and just want to know where the bug stuff is and whether it will work. You’d think that living in New Hampshire one would gradually become inured. Not so. DEET, that toxic compound we deride during most of the year, becomes our friend. The black flies, part of every year, are simply to be endured.
This week’s blog reflects on our trip to Spain last week but before I go into that, since we didn’t have a blog last week to say this, we would all like to thank Tina and Benoît Tari, aunt and uncle to Boomer Vazquez, for an awesome day at their house and vineyard.
At Proctor, we live in this wonderful bubble where intellectual curiosity is celebrated, students embrace challenging conversations alongside each other, safely travel the world on Proctor’s off-campus programs, warm meals are provided three times a day, and our biggest stress is not having enough hours in the day to learn all we want to learn. Families choose to invest in this safe, supportive, intentional learning community at Proctor, and it is without a doubt the best environment for students to learn about themselves and the world around them.
