Of course, I had known about the tragedy that is Zimbabwe: the repression; the one-man rule; the inflation, then hyperinflation, then (is there a prefix more intensive than hyper?) even-more-hyper inflation; then famine. I had also picked up on the fact that there was an election coming up, and somewhere in the cobwebs of my memory there even sat some of the details about the candidates. I didn’t really learn any new facts from this article, and yet to see it all laid out in 685 words provided vast new insight: an appreciation for the profound helplessness of Zimbabweans, of opposition leaders, of anyone not named Robert Mugabe.

Is this a commentary on the writing, or the facts, or the way in which I have been consuming and processing (and cynically accepting) the news? Probably all three. This is why we write and this is why we read. Facts, headlines, and newsfeeds do not–cannot–give the whole picture.

What is up is sex at boarding school. Abigail Jones and Marissa Miley, the women in the photograph, have written a book called Restless Virgins a non-fiction pseudonymous exposé of life at Milton Academy. The review evokes a number of other stories about sex, boarding school, and adolescence that have been floating through the public consciousness in the last few years. Curtis Sittenfield’s Prep, a fictionalized account was the first of this genre of modern boarding school stories. A number of copycats followed; many never made it to a publisher but were passed around at boarding schools all the same. Kaavya Viswanathan’s ill-fated (and wrongly-accused, but that’s another story altogether) book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life is not about boarding school, but shares many of the same attributes, being about affluent students at an elite public school who are obsessed with college admissions. (The original title of Viswanathan’s book was How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got In.) And then Milton had an all-too-real story of their own as a scandal erupted over sex involving underage students. Meanwhile articles like this one in the Globe and one in the New York Times Sunday Magazine a few months ago have added volume to the discussion. Despite the exertions of the media on this matter, I can’t help but point out that this is simply a limited (albeit interesting) portrait of boarding school life. I haven’t read any of these books, but from some of the more calm reviews, it seems that in many cases the media’s reviews are simply a limited (albeit interesting) portrait of the books.

Two years ago, before Prep was published, the most well-known books about boarding school (Harry Potter aside—I’m talking about real boarding schools) were A Separate Peace and Death Be Not Proud. These books, both of them idyllic, tragic portraits of New England oases in the midst of the Second World War, have largely shaped American images of boarding school for two generations, for better or worse. And yet a moment’s reflection tells us that only a few mid-century schoolboys could have actually lived such idyllic, tragic lives.

Sure, will come the answer, but doesn’t even this limited portrait have a more fundamental message about our culture? Probably. A Separate Peace is certainly an eloquent piece of art about the national psyche at the low point of the Second World War. But that doesn’t mean it is a particularly accurate portrayal of life at boarding school.

Sit-down Meals in Madaba

Fifty-one Arab teenagers stood behind their seats in the King’s Academy dining hall. This meal marked the end of a day that had seen each of them move into a dorm room where for two weeks they would—for many of them for the first time in their lives—live away from their families. Next to them stood the staff. Some had recently graduated from Deerfield and were fresh from supervising and participating in a spirited game of soccer and an equally spirited effort to get two dorm-fulls of teenagers bathed, dressed and to dinner on time. Others were older and more experienced; on summer break from other private schools in ‘Amman, they would teach English, computer skills, and art. At the front of the room stood Eric Widmer and Meera Viswanathan, the recently retired headmaster and first lady of Deerfield who now guide King’s Academy as Founding Headmaster and holder of the Sheikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa Distinguished Chair in the Theory and Practice of Knowledge. All eyes looked to Dr. Eric expectantly. “Bless this food to our use and us to Thy service. Keep us ever mindful of the needs of others,” he boomed, his voice reverberating off the sparkling white walls. The scraping and thumping of chairs filled the vaulted dining hall as everyone sat down to dinner.

* * *

And so my time at the 2006 King’s Academy Summer Enrichment Program began. I had spent the last two days in meetings with my fellow staff getting ready for the program. Much of our time was devoted to learning about etiquette and customs in Jordan, and figuring out how our ideas for activities—mostly memories of favorite Deerfield or summer camp pastimes—could be adapted to use in Jordan. We had carefully gone over the tradition of sit-down meals, agreeing on a classic grace and adapting it to remove any references to a specific religion, deciding to have both a male and female teacher at each table, remembering to use our right hands to eat. So far, thanks to all of our planning, everything was going smoothly.

* * *

Quickly the sound of everyone sitting down to dinner faded away into silence as we began to eat the lamb and rice that had been laid out by the caterer. He now sat on a window sill in the corner next to his rolling stainless steel cart, drinking hot tea from a paper cup.

I looked across the bread basket at Leslie Hotchkiss ’06, my fellow table head. We both knew what came next: we should start a conversation. We had watched our teachers at Deerfield do it all the time—on the first day of a new rotation, or on days when everyone else was simply too tired or distracted to start a conversation themselves. A simple way to bring everyone out of their shell. My mind raced through topics we could discuss. There was no play coming up, no speaker who had been in the auditorium the night before, no football team. I looked at the middle school students arrayed around the table. They probably didn’t even know what American football was, I thought. I looked at them, hoping their might be clues on their faces about what they were thinking about, what they might like to talk about. They all just looked a little lost and confused. Maybe I had better start at the beginning.

“Do you all know why we are eating dinner like this—at small tables with teachers and students together?” My question was met with polite attention, but only one student replied with a shake of her head. I started to explain about eating as a community, making friends, living in a home-away-from-home. Students nodded, smiled, agreed that it was a good idea. From there, conversation came more easily. The students told us about their homes, they wanted to know if this was how we ate our meals at Deerfield. They asked what else we did at Deerfield, did we play football (by which they meant European football: soccer), had we watched the world cup, did we like Zidane (a popular French footballer).

As the meal came to a close, Leslie and I began to explain what it meant to be a waiter, how they were to take the dishes from the table, scrape the food into the trash can and pile the plates on the caterer’s cart. Our explanation done, the waiter from our table took a stack of plates to the corner, joining the waiters from the other tables. We returned to our conversation, but it soon became clear that over in the corner by the stainless-steel cart, the scraping and piling was not going according to plan. The waiters were having a large discussion in Arabic. After a few minutes the waiters reached a consensus, and the tables were cleared quite rapidly. We had announcements and the kids went off to their dorms, but a few of us stayed behind looking at the stainless-steel cart perplexed. The waiters had stacked the plates on the tray, and put all the extra food in the trash, save the bread. Every last crumb of bread was in two shopping bags they had found, sitting on the cart beside the plates. Had we missed something in adapting sit-down meals to Jordanian culture?

At staff meeting the next day, our curiosity burst over and before Dr. Meera could get on with her agenda, we had to know why the waiters had accorded the bread from our lunch special treatment. Miss Salwa, a Jordanian assistant teacher, smiled patiently and explained the special status that bread is given in Islamic culture, how it is considered more holy than other foods and so is never thrown in the trash. What had appeared to us to be an unruly mob of teenagers was in fact the waiters excitedly figuring out their own way of reconciling our Deerfield traditions of waiting on tables with their Arab traditions of showing respect for bread.

* * *

We learned, as the program went on, to be very flexible. Some activities worked well: capture the flag was an instant hit, and the only game other than football that the boys would even consider playing. Some ideas did not work so well: try as we might, two weeks was just not long enough to habituate the kids to walking only on the paths. The kids also had a few contributions of their own: Islamic graces at dinner, a creative approach to learning English, and boundless energy. It was not Deerfield, but at King’s Academy “we still study and work, play and sing, and pause to look up to the hills.”