This site dedicates plenty of space to extracurricular stuff: the humor, irony and angst of campus life. Today, however, let's consider the academic foundation to mission of the school. Afterall, for all of the experiential stuff we do, we are in truly academic setting seven or eight hours out of the day.
The concept of academic diversity is introduced from the start, and the systems that enable us to succeed with such individuals have been in place for many decades. Happily, the multi-dimensionality of Proctor--the fact that we have all of these prototypic experiential programs and an egalitarian social ethos (to name two examples) attracts a critical mass of high-achieving students for whom structured support services are peripheral or meaningless.
So, academic diversity means more than the ability to serve kids who benefit from tutors. We're focusing on kids who are ready to work, and we've proved that effort goes a very long way toward high achievement.
Some kids are just motivated. They seem to be wired that way, or perhaps they're the fortunate product of great childhood experiences. Others turn on to achievement while they're here, responding positively to the emphasis on effort and the availability of extra help. This is a chemistry study group in the library conference room during study hall.
Yesterday, honors biology enjoyed guest speaker Eric Simons, the nation's leading writer of advanced biology textbooks for schools and colleges. Admittedly something of a slacker in high school, he became passionate about biology through a sixth grade project, and went on to earn both a Bachelor of Science and and Masters in biology in just four years at Wesleyan. He was passionate about something, and he pursued that passion.
After following the Grateful Dead for a while, Eric spent seven years earning his Doctorate at Harvard, where he focused on technology and its applications to biology. Opening one of his texts, yesterday, he read a random line and declared, "If you became the world's expert of that one subject, you'd have it made!" Passion.
Another observation on the generation of students we see at Proctor: "In terms of the digital world, you are natives; the rest of us (older) are immigrants...."
The lightening fast evolution of technology demands that we think creatively as to how we teach to "digital natives." How do we use cell phones, and/or text messaging to share questions in a lecture hall?
