My boarding school experience was odd because I was a fac brat, so I lived at home, but on campus. And many of my teachers had seen me grow up.

However, when I was down in LA a couple of months ago, a friend from high school was expressing a certain sadness that, in the age of cell phones and email, no one would be able to have anything close to the boarding school experience that he had had.

There we are lot of people with interesting stories - including a fellow named Alvaro de Orleans-Bourbon who was supposed to be a member of the Spanish royal family - but also a lot of boring preppy assholes who are now investment bankers.

It was an interesting mix that's for sure. My oldest friend, who I met at the orientation dance, was the stepdaughter of the Shah's right-hand man who got out just before the Iranian revolution. Her roommate was a humble girl from Queens whose mother had abandoned her to the care of her grandparents.

ETA: My university seemed much more homogeneous upper-middle class.

Of course, because Choate (or Coke Rosemary Hall as we called it for years due to said drug bust) is one of the Select Sixteen! I'm sure it was a great blow to his ego.

Heh. No, he just thought I was terribly low-class. Which was fine.

OH OH OH I know this one. who are all the people msbelle hated in college.

Hah! Those are a lot of the people I went to college with too! Except I was annoyed by all the people who had just gotten there from boarding school, cause they were already jaded. I was all "OMG! I'm at college! Away from my parents! WHOOOT!" and they were like "Tcha, whatever, bitches. We've been at boarding school the past four years, drinking up a storm and lying and sneaking around and doing all this shit and hating on our roommates already. We're OVER IT. Go to hell. We're sooooo much cooler than you people"

Which they were. But STILL. Annoying snots in their J Crew uniforms. Hrmph.

And then they all went on to become I-bankers and shit, and are rolling in the dough somewhere. Ay.

Shocking, somehow, that I was friends with all the theater students who were on financial aid and are now, um, working for nonprofits and academia and shit?

[EDIT: Which is to say, I was always jealous in high school of people who got to go to boarding school. And then I went to college, and met them, and decided I probably wouldn't send my kids to boarding school ever]

My nephew is about to go off to boarding school and I think we are both thrilled that at least this way he will be away from his mother.

There are also a lot of flavors of boarding school. I spent some time up at Cate School while Drew was installing a system for them, and that's definitely not what I used to think of when I thought boarding school.

I've been there on a long ago trip. Friends of my parents left Suffield to go teach there and we visited them. It was one of the few CA schools that were on the prep radar.

Yeah, still elitist, but with a heavy dose of hippy mixed in with the preppy.

I had a couple of students who went to Cate. And Robert Louis Stevenson, and at least two who went to Thacher where each student gets a horse.

Facebook helps people find msbelle. It helps my former students find me. When I first started teaching in LA, I had a class of 70 for 2 years. They were in a special program blah blah blah. They graduated high school this year; 23 of them were accepted to USC on a full ride. They are all friending me on facebook and updating me on their whereabouts. It's really odd and sweet.

And the article! Ruby Payne! She spoke at a conference and lots of the folks at that first LA school I was at were pushing her book. I remember thinking it was both pat and also interesting to have something acknowledged that teachers knew to be true. Different norms in different social classes.

Definitely an interesting class discussion.

For me, boarding schools mean something completely different. As I was growing up, there was still a lot of controversy over the BIA boarding schools and the (almost entirely deleterious) effect that those had had on the Alaskan Native population.

I did read about prep schools and the like in various books, but those seemed so far removed from "real life. I didn't know anyone who went off to school until college. Although, if it had ever been presented as an option, I think would have jumped at the chance to go to a performing arts boarding school - maybe.

I ran headlong into some class issues this weekend, or, well, financial distinction issues.

Once a year I cook for a weekend of up to 40 people doing maintenance on a lodge in the mountains, and we all chip in to cover the cost of the food.

This weekend I was teamed up with this other woman, and despite being provided the amount we had for the budget and working out a shopping list with her in advance, when she went to buy the food, she spent more than twice the allotted budget--at Whole Foods. (!!!) She didn't ask if we had any of the supplies already (we did), although (to be fair) she didn't ask to be compensated for what she spent over the budget. She chose to prepare a number of dishes which were very labor-intensive and required lots and lots of ingredients, while I'd argued for something a bit less ambitious.

We ended up wasting a lot of food or not using what she'd bought, because she bought too much or prepared too much.

She was very nice. And yet I found myself stewing because I usually get a lot of props for cooking fun meals for a copy of dozen people without blowing a wad of cash.

I don't know how much of my resentment is just jealousness that I didn't get the strokes I usually do; or annoyance that she thought it was important to throw so much money at the issue. As it was, an enormous amount of food got wasted, and/or left there when we left this afternoon. What we had was very good. But still!

And yet, very nice person. Just seemed kind of oblivious to the fact that the community as a whole isn't really gourmet or upper class in any meaningful way. Perhaps I'm overreading it all.