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.

Last week Mountain Classroom immersed ourselves in the West Virginia hills on our 4-night solos. The days were filled with sun and nights with rain with solos giving us time to reflect, catch up on sleep, and enjoy personal reading. Since then we have been driving north as we investigate small-scale, sustainable farming. In Virginia we visited Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farms, made famous by Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. Our next stop was participating in the Run Like the Wind 10K in Ellenville, NY before arriving at Sparrowbush Farm in Hudson, NY. Sparrowbush Farm is owned and managed by Ashley Loehr, Instructor Coco Loehr’s elder sister. We finally had the opportunity to get dirty while helping Ashley prepare for the growing season. Now Mountain Classroom is moving onto Vermont where we will be taking finals at Ned’s Place at the Merck Forest and Farmland Center in Rupert, VT.

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. 

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. 

Why offer students a time in their days to sit quietly, focus their thoughts, quiet their bodies, set their intentions, and just have a time of reflection, relaxation, and rejuvenation? In a world such as ours at Proctor, which might be seen as a magnificent bubble away from the greater culture around us, our students are challenged to do their very best. And this can become stressful.

Just as Friday’s student panel during Revisit Day highlighted the impact of a Proctor education, today’s conversation between visiting families and current students reinforced how important it is to allow yourself to be curious. Nearly every student on the panel articulated how his or her experience at Proctor has been one of redefinition. But why is this? What environmental factors allow for this type of uncharacteristic vulnerability among adolescents at Proctor?

This week’s March 30^th editorial by Frank Bruni, College Admissions Shocker! is a humorous poke at the ridiculously competitive landscape of some of the top colleges in the country. The author of the editorial, and the best selling book Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, takes on the foolishness of college admissions rate in a delightfully provocative way. And it has got me thinking on the eve of our own Revisit Day about our own school, our own process, and what the difference is between the landscapes of independent secondary schools and colleges.