Your Questions About Boarding School Answered

Happy Saturday!

For the couple of people who asked, my evening with my friends last night went great! My only regret is bringing a drawing-based game to a party with three art teachers. (Think like the game Telephone, but with pictures.)

Truthfully, this game is more fun with at least one bad drawer.

However, that's just not what I feel drawn to write about today. (No pun intended.) Yesterday, a friend commented asking about boarding school, and this is a question I get a lot from both adults and students, so here are the basics:

Q1: Did you really go to boarding school?

A1: Yes! I attended the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities in Muncie, IN during my junior and senior years of high school. These are the only two years the school offers. 

Q2: Why did you go? Were you a "bad child"? Were your parents trying to get rid of you?

A2: Nope. The Academy is one of several public boarding schools in the country. They exist to combat the "brain drain" of bright students fleeing rural states for the coasts. I went to The Academy because I just wasn't being challenged at my home high school. I was also a very serious kid and was craving a social life with other students who were as into school and academia as I was (hence the long loss of contact with my hometown friends). 

Q3: Did you miss home?

A3: Most of the time, no. (Sorry, Mom.) Sometimes, yes, especially during my senior year when I was dealing with college applications. We'd have three day weekends once per month, so we could spend some time at home. However, The Academy did dissuade me from applying to the Ivy League. By senior year, I knew I wanted to stay close to home, so I went to Northwestern and then moved back to Indiana after graduation. 

Q4: Wasn't it expensive?

A4: Nope! Since it's a public school, they charge a modest room and board fee that covers all tuition, housing, food, etc. The charge has risen a bit since I went, but when I was there, my parents were probably saving money over keeping me at home. 

Q5: Did you wear uniforms?

A5: No. Pajama day was every day. And our teachers had offices in the basement of the dorm. It was pretty typical to see kids talking to teachers in their slippers. 

Q6: What was it like?

A6: This is the question I get the most, and the answer is that it was incredible. I wouldn't trade my two years at that school for anything. While we were still heavily supervised and bound to curfews and some other pretty restrictives rules (no cars, mandatory "face check" at 6:30 and 10:30 every day, mandatory study sessions every week night your first quarter), we also had a lot of freedoms more similar to what college students experience. Our schedules were college-like, in that you might have a 10 am class, a 2 pm class and a 3 pm class, or two classes in the morning and then nothing until 4:00. We had full run of Ball State facilities and could go anywhere the bus or our feet would take us as long as we were back for curfew. We learned pretty quickly that if you hung out at the student center Starbucks early in the morning on Saturdays, you'd catch them training new hires and could get free slightly-wrong drinks. 

     It's funny; I never refer to The Academy as "high school." High school is where I went freshman and sophomore year. In my head, The Academy is more like pre-college. It's a place where I learned how to manage my time and my identity. My whole life, my self-image revolved around being the smart kid. That's impossible to do at a school full of high-octane perfectionists. I had to really look inside myself and find what nourished my mind and my soul the most. I am not sure I would have learned that lesson anywhere else.

     It was our eighth grade English teacher, Mrs. Drake, who first encouraged my older brother to apply to The Academy. She knew he wasn't going to get everything he needed in our hometown. I think about that a lot, how she put his needs and his welfare over that of the district, which surely was not happy to lose his test scores (or mine, for that matter). Working in that same district now, I have a greater appreciation for all the things it does well, but I will always be grateful to Mrs. Drake for recognizing that even the best districts don't do everything well. Sometimes our students need a little more than we can give them. For my brother and me, The Academy met that need.