Hi Sarah, 
Wow - congratulations on moving into your last year in college! Savor it and all the opportunities it affords you. So Private vs. Public – key points.

1. Private schools can hire whomever they want; you don’t need certification from the state, so that’s nice!

2. Independent schools have a generally accepted reputation (especially boarding schools) for giving their teachers a good deal of autonomy, to an extent that you’d rarely find in public schools. Since there aren’t state mandated curricula or yearly standardized test, schools and teachers have flexibility to design academics around the schools mission and often the teacher’s interests and passions. 

3. Boarding schools are often very close knit communities for both students and faculty. “Relationships” is the key word at boarding schools – alumni often recall the close-knit relationships they’ve formed with friends and adult mentors. A lot of times you know a kid from multiple settings – the dorm (house in our case), the classroom, the athletic field, dining centers, extracurriculars. This feeling of community is often what attracts many independent school teachers to residential schools specifically. 

4. Be careful though – boarding (vs. day) schools can wear you down, and quickly! Especially as a younger teacher, be careful about saying yes to everything. It can feel like the thing to do in order to establish a reputation and become integrated into the school, but your relative age is often synonymous with the capacity for doing what they can’t get others to do. Will you coach this, run debate team, drive these kids to the mall, help out with the bake sale, take on an extra course??? You’re young and capable! Just watch out - it takes a while to learn to say no, but it’s one of the most useful words you’ll ever add to your vocabulary at boarding school. 

5. Sometimes I like to use the phrase “golden handcuffs” to describe boarding school work and life. It comes with its perks: great health benefits, good retirement savings, oftentimes free housing and food, good professional development, etc. On the downside, you’re almost always on call (especially when you live in a dorm) and it’s sometimes hard to have a social life outside of the school (which you should have!). Sometimes the benefits seem so great that you might never want to leave, despite feeling like you’re being worked to the bone (which you might be). My advice, always question whether what you’re doing is what you love doing. If it’s not, don’t hesitate to say sayonara, despite what you may be giving up. Other opportunities will arise; just give them time. 

Well I hope that gives you a bit of an idea. I love independent schools – went to them myself and believe they offer students opportunities that are precious and valuable. The same for teachers at those schools. I can’t speak about public school teaching from personal experience and I don’t want to mis-characterize anything, so I’ll just leave it there. Lastly, every school is different and while I can kind of generalize about independent schools and boarding schools, I don’t pretend to speak for everyone’s experience. 

Best and good luck to you! Have a great summer. 

Great Question. My family wonders the same thing – they think it would be annoying to have your students around all the time, and while sometimes it’s nice to get away, there’s something to be said for the continuity of experience that is possible because they both live and learn on the same campus. I’m a housemaster (dorm head), which means that I also play a large role in their lives outside of the classroom. I imagine working in a day school with kids from very different backgrounds might be hard because a teacher never knows what kind of support a kid is or is not getting at home. At boarding school, the playing field is equalized and every kid receives the same attention and opportunities for support in and outside the classroom. That continuity is invaluable and it makes life at boarding school seem more like a big family than an impersonal institution. 

Okay – a little bit tricky. When you say you found three boarding schools that will give you full tuition scholarships, I’m not sure if you mean you’ve researched them or you’ve already connected with them and they’ve guaranteed your scholarships if you can score well on the SSAT. 

Whatever is the case, you need to consider the following: The boarding school/prep school track is all about high achievement in a rigorous academic setting. There are few boarding schools that don’t put a great deal of focus on academic success and college admissions (if you find some that don’t, can you let me know – I’m curious). One advantage to boarding/prep school is that colleges mostly know the names and so associating with a good prep school can give you an added advantage if you’re focused on college admissions. So if you end up at boarding school, you’re definitely going to feel the pressure of SATs, GPA, college admissions etc, but you will also have added support structures that help facilitate your success, which you may not have had at your other school. 

Given that boarding school creates expectations for high achievement, I think the most important thing is to find the right one. Financial aid may be a determining factor, but you have to remember if you’re going to be some place away from your family/friends support network, it should be some place where you can thrive and be happy, both with the challenges (academic/co-curricular) the school presents you with, but also with the culture and social environment. 

Definitely, if you haven’t: When researching schools – if you can, visit them. Talk to the people who live there. Observe students in classes and in the dorms. Talk to teachers about the place. Is there a sense of community? Do students and teachers get along well? Does everyone feel supported? Do people seem happy?

People who choose boarding school or who have it chosen for them are going to be faced with academic pressure, for sure. The key is to find a way to balance your emotional, physical, and mental well being with a healthy social support structure and ideally a culture where people value each other for who they are, not just for what they’ve achieved. 

Hi Aaron from Omaha, 

Thanks for the question. Growing up I had some unique and impacting educational experiences. From seventh grade onward I went to boarding school. My first boarding school was an all-boys touring choir school called the American Boychoir School in Princeton NJ. I spent over half the school year for two years traveling around the world giving concerts. As adolescents and young teenagers we were trained professionals, all the while we were on our tour bus doing our studies and we had one teacher for each tour who would walk up and down the aisles of the bus helping each boy with the packets that the teachers back at the school had prepared. 

Afterward, not wanting to go back to regular public school, I applied to boarding high schools and ended up at the Lawrenceville School, just a couple miles down the road. There the independence I gained at the boychoir school made the transition easy, and I was ready to be exposed to a rigorous academic environment and heady intellectualism. There learning happens around a Harkness Table through discussion-based classes. I learned to value the opinions of my peers through that method, to engage both the teacher and students more fully and to carry the experiences of learning outside the classroom. 

After I left Lawrenceville I remember saying to someone that I would one day come back to teach. In a way I felt I wanted to give back for all that I had been granted. So 6 years ago I did. 

Now I’m at this point in my life where I’m starting to consider new ways of designing opportunities for people to impact and build their own communities. 

For me traditional educational institutions aren’t enough, and it’s a time of great experimentation in education. 

My desire for change comes from a dissatisfaction with consumer/corporate/capitalist culture. I feel too much like a cog in a wheel and I sometimes look around my school and feel like all we do, despite our best efforts to resist, is prepare them for life in a system where credentials are most important, where success is tied to money and fame, and where life is synonymous with labor. 

I think the answer is in the design of our communities — the principles we choose to live by. When we are born into this system we also follow principles, which indicate our society’s values, but they are so deeply ingrained in everyday life that we hardly see them because we’re lost in the fog. To consciously choose a set of guiding principles that push against the current system is the only way to resist and lay the groundwork for a future which values our inherent humanity over our potential for labor. 

I have a related post on this: http://sheamusburns.com/post/54916103713/thoughts-on-freedom