BY: TREVOR HEWITT
“Anything you want to give me now before I find it?”
I shook my head.
“Spread your legs, please.”
I thought I had misheard her at first. She repeated herself, and reluctantly I obeyed. After, she started rifling through my bag, chucking my clothes onto the table beside her.
Eventually I was brought up with the other students to our “rooms” – old classrooms that, instead of being renovated into residence-style dorms, had been outfitted with single-sized bunk beds and flimsy white closets. I turned to my dad. He looked me in the eye, and said something I’ll never forget. “You’ll thank me for this one day.”
Lying in bed that night, I gazed at the chalkboard to my side while listening to my roommates’ huff nitrous from shaving creamcanisters. My dad’s words couldn’t seem further from the truth.
A recent study suggests that children faced with stressful or difficult situations show enhanced mental flexibility. In other words, adults who had tough childhoods think better on their feet in difficult situations than those who didn’t.
For me, the biggest difference between boarding school and regular high school was how much accountability it forced upon you. All students had base “privileges”, which could be taken away based on infractions. For the first couple of weeks I slipped by under the radar. But after arguing with my business teacher, I found myself unable to leave the building for 10 days. And so, confined to a minimally-refurbished and dreary St. Catharines boarding school, I began to think about something I had failed to acknowledge before then: Why was I in this situation?
As a teenager I spent way too much time focusing on my friendships and hardly any time on schoolwork or family. After I started high school, things took a nosedive. I fought with my parents almost non-stop – breaking curfews, arguing over rules and ignoring simple requests like cleaning my room. The summer before Grade 10 things escalated to the point where the previously idle threat of shipping me away to boarding school became very real.
I don’t remember exactly what argument caused it, just that it happened after a particularly heated night. Fed up, my dad told me I’d be leaving in a couple of weeks once school started.
The school I was sent to is a hardcore place. Since it is meant for children with aggression-based learning disabilities (something I didn’t have), the first thing we were told by the principal when we got there was that if we broke any serious rules twice, that instead of going home for major holidays, we’d have to go on a five-day orienteering trip at Algonquin Park (Yes, it runs during Christmas. I would know, I went.)
After my first dinner at the school, my roommate Preston approached me. “Hey man, you need weed or oxys?” At least now I knew what they were searching my bag for.
Fast-forward seven years and, although the experience was tough as hell, I couldn’t be happier that I went there. Now, let me be very clear. This school was horribly structured – the principal running it was, at best, emotionally abusive. Staff did nothing to stop the seniors from pressuring younger students to smoke, bullying was tolerated unless it caused physical harm and, well, drugs were readily available anywhere.
But it made me able to empathize with other people’s problems, not just because I wanted to undo my situation but because increased time for reflection allowed me to become better at putting myself into other people’s shoes, something I had real trouble with. Not only did boarding school help repair my weak relationship with my parents, the routine consistency gave me motivation to structure my own life.
Researchers at Princeton University published a study, which found that crowded living spaces negatively affect your ability to focus. In other words, cluttered spaces are harder to focus in as multiple stimuli are competing for your brain’s recognition.
Prior to boarding school, my parents enabled much of my laziness. They would do my laundry, clean up my room and make my meals. After returning from boarding school I gradually began to do these tasks on my own and found a sense of empowerment unparalleled by my previous laziness and procrastination. Though it might not work for everyone, boarding school was the wake-up call I needed, maybe not to get my life on track, per se, but at least to get it structured and organized. Seven years later, my room is still spotless.
Thanks dad.
Image sourcing: ridleycollege.com, ukboardingschools.com, istock.com