This past week was amazing, we spent 5 days in Amsterdam. Amsterdam is a gorgeous city, the architecture is beautiful and there is so much art and culture to learn about. The museums we went to were so cool! We went to the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh, Museum, the Kroller-Müller Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum, focusing on Modern to Contemporary.
After several weeks living and learning with host family and establishing a class and afternoon activity routine, Proctor en Segovia students traveled north to El País Vasco, Euskadi, or The Basque Country. To complement their History and English coursework, they studied Basque history and culture firsthand and contemporary art at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
Pulling into Raymond, Maine, I passed by the Murch Cemetery. I filed the name in the back of my mind because of its homonym, thinking to myself, “I wonder what the Merch - hats and t-shirts - from Murch looks like?”
Two and a half weeks ago, Ocean Classroom 2022 gathered on the docks of Mystic Harbor in Connecticut, ready to set sail for a term at sea. A last minute repair to the Harvey Gamage delayed their actual departure, allowing the student crew to spend a week aboard the tall ship Joseph Conrad before transferring up the coast to the Oliver Hazard Perry, a historic square rigged tall ship out of Newport, Rhode Island. As repairs continue aboard Gamage, Ocean Classroom continues to learn hard, valuable lessons in patience and persistence as they continue their marine biology, literature, and navigation studies at Camp Wohelo on Sebago Lake, Maine.
First week! We all arrived last Wednesday, of course exhausted. Even though we spent most of the first week getting over jet lag, we were all able to have a lot of fun. The past week and a half has been orientation and getting ourselves situated in our new lives in France.
Proctor en Segovia Fall 2022 program participants have completed their first full week of living and learning abroad in Segovia, Spain. As they acclimate to new classes and life with a Spanish host family, students learn to suspend judgment and through observation and experience. They also build new connections with each other, their teachers, and their host family, often over a shared meal. In this post, students write about their first twenty-four hours in Spain, communication in a foreign language, and food and cultural differences.
In 1994, Proctor Academy pioneered a trimester at sea program for high school students unlike any independent school had done before. Twenty-nine years later, Ocean Classroom set sail from Mystic, Connecticut with 22 student crew members whose lives are about to be changed forever.
At the beginning of last spring, I had the opportunity to observe Tom Morgan’s Creative Nonfiction class in action as students worked in small groups to create podcasts. Their assignment was to document the collective Proctor response to the first weeks of the war between Russia and Ukraine. Tom invited me to his class to discuss the basics of digital storytelling and audio sequencing, including how to select, trim and arrange different audio elements into a cohesive story.
