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Ranting and raving in the early spring
I don't know about where you were this weekend, but here in New England it was a beautiful weekend--warm and sunny without being too hot. At the boarding school where my girlfriend lives, that meant that students were out on just about every open patch of grass enjoying the weather by sunning themselves, playing ultimate frisbee, throwing around footballs or baseballs, passing a ball back and forth with lacrosse sticks, picnicing, or just sitting around reading, studying, or talking. It was reminiscent of spring days in college, with somewhat less of a brewery smell to the proceedings. Point being, it was a gorgeous weekend to do nothing.
Except, of course, that some of us were constrained by other factors such that we were not permitted to do nothing. Perhaps that accounts for my foul mood in what follows, but I doubt it, because this type of thing annoys me even when I'm in the best of humors. What I mean is this: kids out on the lawns meant all kinds of crap left out on the lawns. Empty bottles from their beverages, empty wrappers from their refreshments; discarded flip-flops and t-shirts; even, near one dorm, a text book and a graphing calculator that retails for $137.
Now, the trash is annoying in its own right. How do kids get to be this age without some concept of picking up after themselves? Wasn't that right there in kindergarten with sharing? But then, that's not always a lesson that's been internalized by this age either. Still, it annoys the hell out of me when I see students leaving messes in their wake, particularly when a trash can exists within a short distance. My own parents and other adults drilled this into me and my peers when we were growing up, and I try to be one of those adults now, though often we don't see who has made a mess, we just see the mess.
The casual disregard for personal belongings, though, is even more baffling. To a certain extent, I suspect that it's symptomatic of feeling comfortable in a place, and that's no bd thing. I saw this at my old school as well, where students would leave laptop computers sitting around while they went to lunch, for instance. In a safe community, there often is not a worry that something left somewhere will be stolen, and thus there's not a huge incentive to keep close track of things like that. Still, in this case, I saw the items in question when I was taking the dog out for her walk before putting her to bed, around 11:30, when the students were also well on their way to being put to bed. In short, no one was coming back for these items, and I can't imagine that the dews that night bring are good for either a book or for a rather expensive piece of electronics.
I suppose, in a way, I played a negative role in this little drama by bringing these items into the dorm. After all, if these kids are protected from the natural consequences of their actions, how are they likely to learn from their mistakes? Still, I couldn't conscience leaving out either the book or the calculator in weather that could prove potentially fatal to either or both. Considering what these families are paying to send their progeny to this school, it's quite possible that neither the parents nor the kids would even blink at replacing a $137 calculator if it was damaged or just lost--which is rather obnoxious in its own way, isn't it?