After spending our first couple days at Red Rock Canyon in Las Vegas, we all piled onto Deb (our trusty bus) and spent the four hour drive down to Utah playing games and looking out the windows at the beautiful scenery. For our first night we camped in the front country and slept in tent/tarp shelters for the first time on this trip, as we had just been sleeping in sleeping bags at Red Rock.
Although we are not on the cobbled streets of Europe, we find immense beauty in the natural world of central Arizona.
Core to any Mountain Classroom experience is teaching students to adapt, to embrace challenges, to be prepared for the unexpected and to work collaboratively to face each obstacle that arises. When COVID-19 threatened to cancel Proctor’s Mountain Classroom program this winter, instructors Quinn Harper and Erica Hample partnered with program director Patty Pond and Proctor’s Health Center staff to create a quarantine and testing protocol that would allow the program to function, with modifications, and allow ten lucky students to experience a term of place-based learning and expeditions in the American Southwest. Today, we share the group’s first blog post after ten days together.
For the past 27 years, Proctor students have spent the Fall Term studying aboard an historic tall ship, sailing the eastern seaboard of the United States. This coveted off-campus experience has always been limited to the Fall Term, however, COVID-19 forced us to creatively look at our off-campus offerings this winter. With Proctor en Segovia unable to run due to travel restrictions, Ocean Classroom program director Brooks Bicknell '77 went to work reimagining a winter trimester program partnered with the World Ocean School based in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. Today, eight students are aboard the schooner Roseway after rigorous COVID-19 testing and quarantine, ready to launch the experience of a lifetime. Read more from this group's first week together!
Over the last decade, Proctor Academy's European Art Classroom program has provided hundreds of students the opportunity to immerse themselves in an art colony in the south of France. With COVID-19 shutting down international travel, program directors Dave and Jen Fleming reinvented the art immersion program stateside. Retaining the essence of the European Art Classroom experience (shared meals, plein air painting, art history and culture classes, art journals, sketchbooks, and living in community), the Southwest Art Classroom experience is underway in Arizona. Enjoy this brief update from Pheobe '21!
If 2020 has taught us anything it is 1) to remain flexible and 2) the importance of relationships. Ocean Classroom 2020 instilled these two critical lessons in the twenty-one Proctor students who called the schooner Roseway home for the past ten weeks. Congratulations to the crew of Ocean Classroom on completing an unforgettable journey.
Temperatures in the 70s, sunshine, and blue skies have been a gift to our students and faculty as we enter the home stretch of the Fall Term. We soak up every moment of these extra days of meals and classes outside and our final practices before Holderness Weekend knowing well this weather won't last. We encourage each other to live in the moment, to suck the marrow out of each day, not knowing what the next will bring in this COVID-19 laden world.
Proctor’s Ocean Classroom program has made its way to Cumberland Island, Georgia as they prepare for the long open sea voyage to St. Croix, US Virgin Islands in the coming week. Unsettled weather in the Atlantic has delayed Roseway’s departure for this 13 day open water voyage, but the students and program are committed to making this experience happen. Read more from the past week on Ocean Classroom in the student journal entries below and enjoy a few video clips from the past week.
