As I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently attending a “Folkehøyskole“, which among other things involves living at the school. This is a rather special situation which can be both very rewarding and sometimes a bit frustrating. First of all, it’s really nice to not have to travel by bus each morning to get to the school, and worry about being stuck in traffic. It also comes in handy when you have free periods during the day, and you feel the need to go “home”, you can be there in an instant. However, you do often get the feeling that you’re living in a kind of bubble, because everything you do, school, musical activities, socializing, meals, sleeping etc. happens at the school.

No matter how you see it though, there is really nothing that can be compared to living so close to so many persons your own age and with similar interests. It creates a feeling of fellowship that you won’t find anywhere else. It’s also fun to see what can happen when so many young people live together in terms of creative efforts. For example, our dorm woke up one day to discover that our kitchenette had been covered in newspaper, and I mean really covered, each single object in the room had been wrapped in paper, the sofas and the walls, even the TV-antenna had been carefully wrapped, part by part, so that you could still see its shape. We found out later that a group of students had spent two hours on this project in the middle of the night. Another day some students decided to declare as emo-day, meaning that all the students were encouraged to adopt an emo-style for a day. This resulted in about 30 students walking around an entire day in black clothes with crazy hair and make-up, some even had black tears painted in their face. They also recited an emo-poem in front of the school, inclusive the teachers.

This brings me to another advantage of living at a boarding school, you get to know your teachers much better than you do in a a normal school. We always have a person on duty which is responsible for the welfare of the students, the teachers take turns to do this each day. This means that you get to meet the teachers much more frequently and in different settings, they will often organize social activities, they will eat together with the students, they do rounds at the end of the day where they visit the dorms and check that everything is ok. You really get to know them on a different level, and you can tell that they really care about you as a person, not just as a student.

I would say that life at a boarding school is something so unique that you really have to experience it for yourself. Although it can feel a bit different or isolated at times, the spirit and the fellowship at our school is really something you cannot find elsewhere, and it makes each day seem rewarding. Well, perhaps not Monday, because dinner always involves fish on Mondays, but that’s another matter.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 11:18 am and is filed under This and that. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.