As we begin the third week of classes, we remind ourselves that it is often that which we experience outside of the traditional classroom that has the greatest impact. This is what we seek to do at Proctor. To get proximate to our learning. To feel it with all five of our senses, and then to take that learning with us into our lives beyond the official end of the class block.
The ramp up to student arrival can feel prolonged, but when we finally have our entire community together for that first assembly of the school year, it is electric.
Each Registration Day, you can feel the rollercoaster of emotion as families arrive on campus and their Proctor experience begins in earnest. The theoretical idea of having a child attend boarding school becomes reality, and while much of everyone’s energy centers around excitement for what lies ahead, we acknowledge there is just enough anxiety and sense of loss to make the emotions of the day challenging.
In September we published THIS blog post discussing the term acedia and its ancient roots that aptly describe the situation in which we have found ourselves in over the past thirteen months: listlessness, undirected anxiety, and inability to concentrate. At the end of the Fall Term, we shared thoughts on emotional agility and the need to come to terms with the complexity of that which we were experiencing. Over the weekend, The New York Times published an article titled, Feeling: It’s Called Languishing in which the author, Adam Grant, describes the joyless and aimless state that has besieged so many of us over the past year. We are inundated with messages seeking to help us make sense of this chapter of our lives.
This week was our first 5 day trip away from our home, Casa Grande. On Monday the 25th we left for our adventure, loading up the van with our painting supplies, bags, crazy creeks, and Carnets (sketchbooks) in hand.
As the Proctor community swings back to in-person learning this week, as the dorm pods loosen and disperse, the interconnectedness of all that is Proctor, the mycelium underneath, reveals itself. Coming back to in-person gets the network humming. Yes, we can do a lot remotely, but we get to the “it “ of learning by being in the landscape, not simply observing it from the outside.
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!
One of the challenges of working in school communications is the inability to disconnect from the world of social media. There is always something to post, someone to follow, a comment to which we must reply, and, inevitably, comparisons to others to be made. We know the perils of social media and the damage it can do in the lives of children, and recognize we can fall victim to these dangers as adults as well.
