Choose your poison. Main the title page. Me all you'd ever wanna know. Writing poems, essays, stories. Art things I've drawn. Music shows, bands, good lines. You interactive inanity. Links good stuff I wish I'd made.
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not a punishment3/26/02What do you think of when you hear boarding? Surfers riding foamy Californian waves? Scruffy kids rolling down the street in packs on their skateboards? When I hear boarding, I think of boarding school.Boarding. That's where you live at school. Not just on school nights, not only for a couple days a week. All the time. Do we go home on weekends? We could, but who'd want to? Yes, we even eat there. No, we never get out, and no, we’re not really in touch with the outside world. It’s not perfect, and the pressure there is high, but it’s such a singular, amazing experience that any negatives are negligible in comparison. There’s so much I’d have to say to give you a real idea of what it is to live at boarding school. It’d involve photos, and care packages, and late night conversations, and moments that would be hard to understand outside the context of the school. But I want so much to tell people about this one amazing year I had, so I’ll do my best to show you as succinctly as I can, now that I have your attention. My school certainly loaded on the responsibilities. There is not one minute of a day that isn't a labeled slot in your schedule, except from the end of sports practice on Saturday, at about two thirty, to ten forty-five that night. That was our weekend(if you want to call 8 hours a weekend). The typical day is one obligation after another, with more homework to do than study hall and "free" time combined. There are rules for everything, and if you break them you get up early on Sundays to clean the side of the road. Everyone attends chapel twice a week. Sports eat up a lot of your time. Everyone has a job cleaning part of the campus, and the food tends to be bad. But then there’s dorm life, and your friends. You have a roommate, for better or worse, to live with. You spend all of your time, all of it, on campus with two hundred seventy other teenagers. By the end of a year, you know what size everyone on your dorm wears, what their underwear looks like, how messed up they look when they get up in the morning, and what their favorite cereal is. And that’s only the girls on your dorm, never mind the upperclassmen and guys. After milk and cookie nights, canoe fights, early-morning polar bear jumps, and swamp walks, you couldn’t help but get close to the kids there. All of the talking and crying and just living with everyone brings you close to them so quickly. Some people I got to know too well, but I’ll never complain. I take that back. I’ve complained plenty. But that’s the thing about boarding. With everyone all packed up into one little dorm, everything else is compacted and made more potent, too - especially emotions. When you’re happy at boarding school, it’s the most powerful feeling; however, when something’s gone wrong at boarding school, you can’t get away from it. It’s around you, and you live in it, and it hurts. But overwhelmingly, boarding school is a good experience. The idea of living ‘on your own’ appeals to a lot of people, but you aren’t completely alone. The teachers live on campus with you and stand in as parents when you need them. Every one of them is so deeply interested in their students’ well-being and in shaping them into productive, successful adults. The entire lifestyle is meant to awake and stimulate independence, industriousness, integrity, and discipline in teenagers. I have seen its results, and I appreciate them - I wouldn’t trade the cookie fights, study sessions, crew races, or friendships there for anything. Anything. So have your parents ever threatened to send you to boarding school if you don’t shape up? Maybe next time, you should take them up on it. |
