Sophie Gee

I just want the listeners to know that I'm very exhausted and it's it's kind of Sittenfeld's fault because of the elite boarding school system in North America.

I have had a gruelling term.

teaching English literature at Princeton, which finished yesterday.

And I have been teaching the students who come out of this very system.

They're groomed.

They're hungry for knowledge.

They know how to write an essay.

They plan ahead.

And boy, they expect to get value for money in the classroom.

And they've run me dry, Jonty.

I've got nothing left.

I couldn't write a synopsis.

All right.

We had a bit of a barney, didn't we, Jonty, about which the reading should be.

I really strongly preferred the other passage in which we'll get to.

I think like as we've observed in our previous episodes on school stories, the nature of the school situation is such that it really brings out the sort of anxious competitive spirit.

You know, it's as though we're in the math classroom or we're in the ancient history classroom, Jonty, and we've done, we've accidentally done

done the same assignment and the question is who's going to have the upper hand and present it first so i'm going to read the passage that we both highlighted when we read the novel and i think what this passage is it is is about the kind of anxiety that attends life in a place like alt or groton as it is in real life

They've just announced that the students are getting their one day off a year, really sort of out of nowhere every year.

They're told that they get a day where they don't have to go to classes.