We Proctor is on Spring Break, we're recycling a few Chuck's Corners from earlier in the school year. This one, posted on October 2, provides some valuable insights on the school's balance of structure and freedom.
We are navigating a campus that is extensively spliced by cyclone fences.
They are positioned to protect us from gaping pits, hissing steam lines and stacks of pipes waiting to connect the Learning Center and Fieldhouse to the new biomass steam plant. For those of us who are used to an open, spacious, pedestrian campus, the effect prompts jokes of a minimal-security prison yard.
It's not that bad; we are still free to move. It brings to mind a quality of Proctor that outsiders grow to appreciate. This school protects specific freedoms for students within clearly defined structures. Some call this "freedom within fences."
So, for example, all students are allowed to walk on all lawns at Proctor, (not true at several neighboring schools.) You choose which meals to attend or not attend. You can arrange to study in the library, or in your dorm room, or with a teacher....
The effect, we hope, is an environment in which the rules exist where they are common sense, but limited to allow us to be real...real adolescents...real relationships. These kids are competing in musical chairs during this morning's assembly.
Where they exist, however, the school's structures are crystal clear. If you're late to a class, there's a response, and repeated lateness results in dorm restriction.
Structure at Proctor is not a matter of coats & ties, sit-down dinners or master-student relationships. But if you don't get your homework in at a level of quality expected by your teacher, a communication chain-reaction is initiated called an NTA (Notice To the Advisor.)
And so it goes. The effect is a community of metaphoric freedoms within fences.
It doesn't take too long to get used to. These freshmen (below) have figured it out.
In the next few weeks, the cyclone fences that divide campus will be repositioned, as the steam line project moves west. The guidelines within which we live, however, will stay where they are. Knowing exactly where they stand creates space in which we enjoy relationships that draw strength from freedom.
