Some people think boarding schools are filled with snobby rich kids that get everything from their parents the second they ask for it. That couldn't be farther from the truth. I spent my high school years in a small boarding school in Upstate New York (And yes, I really mean upstate. Lake Placid is only a little over an hour away from the Canadian border). Sure, it could easily be different in other boarding schools, and maybe those people are actually right, but it wasn't much like that at Northwood School.
There were some kids that came from families who had lots of wealth, but more often than not, they were there thanks to scholarships. There were a lot of international kids, and most didn't speak English that well or at all, but there weren't as many problems with that as you'd think there would be. The teachers were very accommodating, and the kids tried hard to learn English. If they wanted to be there, that is.
Most of the students complained that they hated it, and that they didn't want to come back after every break. These complaints were generally heard after losing a hockey game or doing badly in a ski race. That was all that really mattered at Northwood; the winter sports. Mainly hockey. The teachers loved to tell us "It's not a hockey school," but deep down even they knew it really was.
There were a lot of rules. More so for the boarding kids, of course, but there were a lot. Most kids wouldn't tell you this, or they didn't actually believe it, but they needed rules. They were living at their school, which meant that the teachers had to make sure they were safe and healthy, and able to go back to their families. The rules were good to have in most cases, especially because the majority of the students didn't want to accept that they acted like immature seven year old's 90 percent of the time.
The food was another big complaint, but that was pretty reasonable. When most of the kids get excited for grilled cheese day, because thats not something that's easily messed up, you know it's a problem... Another issue was that in small schools, everything travels fast. You could expect every kid in the school to know everything you had done that weekend by Sunday night. And more often than not, the teachers knew more than most of the kids did.
The teachers knew what they were talking about, and most of them knew how to get the students involved in class. Plus, since it was a boarding school, the teachers could swear if they wanted to. It was always a surprise to hear a teacher swear in the middle of class, and it definitely made the kids pay more attention.
If you didn't learn the class material, you definitely left having learned something about the way high school kids deal with being locked in a building together. It kind of turns out like animals in the wild, you know? There's a leader that picks on the weaker prey while the leaders "pack" just laughs along with him or her, and fights breaking out between the strongest of the animals.
But, despite the amount of times the kids complained while they were there, more often than not, they would come back after they graduated. It's hard to spend multiple years of your life in one building, in a little town in Upstate New York, and not leave feeling a little bit off. A lot of students are in denial, and will continue to be in denial, but Northwood becomes a sort of home. It's a home that a lot of the inhabitants refer to as a prison, but it's a home nonetheless. I will forever cherish my years spent inside those walls.
