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SCMP Reporter

A difficult responsibility

Jeffrey Lu

Phillip's Academy of Andover, Massachusetts, USA

I recently handed out my first weekend restriction. The freshman concerned, faced with a weekend confined to the dorm, glared at me with hateful eyes, then proceeded to take out the giant pile of rubbish that had accumulated over the past four weeks.

As a proctor and a hygiene-observant person, I probably did the right thing. As a fellow student, I will probably feel guilty for a long time.

Every dormitory, whether male or female, 'underclassman' or 'upperclassman', has at least one proctor or prefect.

These students, selected by teachers and house counsellors as role models, are given a wide range of benefits and powers in exchange for becoming the school's disciplining tools.

Among these are the power to hand out restrictions, and the benefit of having a refrigerator and a television in your room.

How strictly a proctor enforces the rules is entirely up to him or her; however, the consequences are not.

The lenient proctor who looks the other way when the  girl wanders out of the male student's room can be severely criticised and subsequently punished by the school disciplining committee.

However, the extremely strict proctor usually finds the rest of the dormitory combining in a joint effort to make his year-long duty as painful as possible. I, like most proctors,  attempt to find

a balance.

Nightmarish weekend

Elita Lai

Westminster School, London

One of the worst traps to fall into in a boarding school is to nod your head when your housemaster asks if you are free on a weekend night.

Without time  to protest, I was granted the task of babysitting my housemaster's children while  he went out.  Little did I know what an exhausting job it would be.

At the beginning, the two boys sat quietly before the TV.  Unfortunately, they were watching Robin Hood. Soon, they were throwing pillows at each other and at me, refusing to stop until I lay 'dead' on the floor.

Luckily I had kept my eyes half open, because one of them was about to lean forward to plant a peck on my face, pretending to be the prince that saved sleeping beauty.

Next, they pulled me into the laundry room and started playing football, cheering when the ball hit the washing machine.

The chaos ended when the housemaster's footsteps sounded through the corridor. He paid me handsomely, but nothing can compensate for the horrors of the night.

The greatest revelation is the striking resemblance between the housemaster and his son, and this gives me insight into how he behaved when he was young.



STUDY ABROAD