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copyright ©1999-2003 |
Remember those shrieks of excitement that echoed down the hallways in your college dorm? Maybe it was a Saturday night and your hall mates were blasting dance music and getting ready to hit the campus en masse to check out the party scene, or maybe it was a fit of late-night studying delirium that caused your roommate to vocalize her frustration. Either way, you probably didn't mind it so much. You probably even shrieked once or twice yourself. Ear-splitting shrieks piercing the silence in a dorm hallway become a whole different story when you actually leave college — and head out into the "real world" of boarding school life. Three months after my college graduation, I moved into another dorm, this time as one of three dorm parents in an all-girls dorm at a small New England boarding school. A few weeks later, the students themselves moved in. Girls from 13 to 18 years old, arms full of Justin Timberlake posters and suitcases packed with tank tops, piled into the dorm. And the shrieking began. Because dormitory life in a boarding school is infinitely more regulated than dormitory life in college, it was part of my job to make the shrieking stop. Sure, instead of a tiny one room double, I had moved into a spacious apartment with a full kitchen, a bright, airy living room, and three huge closets. Unfortunately, with the apartment and the grown up job came a huge amount of responsibility. As a dorm parent, I was required to fulfill certain requirements: usually two nights per week and one weekend per month of dorm duty. On the nights that was on duty I was obliged to be in the dorm from seven o'clock at night until seven the next morning, during which time I monitored a two-hour evening study hall. For the rest of the twelve hours, I remained basically on call, supposedly ready to handle anything that might come up. skedaddle on this-a-way please
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