Auspicious Alums:
-James Dunbar, chairman Dunbar Armored Cars
-Matt Nathanson, singer, songwriter, guitarist, whose music has been featured on the TV series Dawson’s Creek and in the movie American Wedding

Teenagers with wanderlust choose Proctor for its required semester of learning on the open road. The school currently offers four different semester-long trips, primarily to juniors and seniors: to France, to Spain, on a ship down the East coast, and in a van traveling cross-country.

Known as the “Ocean Classroom” the trip to sea puts 20 students aboard a 130-foot schooner and requires them, among other duties, to cycle through four-hour watches—all while sailing south towards their eventual destination, the island of Hispaniola. Along the way students take a full course load, weaving in study of each of 14 ports of call as well as covering topics such as the mathematics of navigation and the literature of the sea.

PROCTOR'S ADVENTURERS.

Last year Amy Coughlin, 17, took part in the road trip, known as the “Mountain Classroom,” traveling with nine fellow students and two teachers in a minibus. In Lake Winnibigoshish, Minn., they studied the history of the fur trade, and in the state’s open hills they went dog sledding. In Rio Grande, Texas they canoed while studying desert ecology and water resource management. As much as she liked it though, Coughlin says that perhaps her biggest lesson came in realizing that a peripatetic life “is not the best working environment for me because it showed me how much structure I crave.”

That kind of honesty is a central part of the Proctor culture. Earlier this semester at a daily assembly where all are invited to express what is on their minds, one student got up and shared his beef: “We talk a lot about trust here, but I’m missing six CDs from a book bag I left in the Student Center. I want them back!” Later that day the CDs were returned.