When you think about it, an employed adult spends eight of twenty-four hours asleep, eight hours busy with "employment," and eight hours doing discretionary stuff: reading, watching T.V., exercising, pursuing hobbies.....whatever. That's not true for coaches and dorm parents who dedicate twenty-four hours a day to their tasks. My focus, though, is not employed adults, but teenagers at a prep school. God only knows how much sleep they get; we pray it's eight hours. We know that from 8:15 in the morning until 3:05 (with a lunch break) they're busy with classes.

 







I don't document the third of our lives we spend sleeping. My interest--today--is with the final third, the eight hours that many adults (outside the boarding school industry) would consider discretionary. And I'm interested in the definition of "residential life," a concept that truly blankets everything at a residential school, but which usually is interpreted to reference hours free from schoolwork. Yet Afternoons are not free.

 









Some would say it's inaccurate to label afternoon activities and sports as specifically "residential life," because they are structured and required by policy. Yet these hours are the essence of residential life at a residential school.

 




During the Depression years, Ro Burbank's "Improvement Squads" maintained school facilities.



A throw-back to those Improvements Squads is today's Woods Team, pictured repairing washout gullies from Hurricane Irene on the Bulkhead Road.



You know, decades later, this slogan still rings true....

 

Matt and his crew know it in Fernandina Beach, on Ocean Classroom.....

 

 Ian (with a bloody nose) knows it on Leonard Field.