A Slice of Life (from my past) by Ms. Guiney

The First Dance I Ever Chaperoned

One of the first moments that I admitted I truly wanted to be a teacher happened while chaperoning a middle school dance. I was fresh out of college, working as a special education assistant teacher in Marshfield. I was working to pay off my debt and start earning money toward getting my masters in speech pathology. I was not going to be a teacher, I had decided a long time ago that I wanted to do something more intense, more challenging with my life. So I took this job and figured it would be a way to make money and earn some references, little did I know that it would change my life.

The first month of the school year, I got to know my students. I was placed in charge of 25 students who would need assistance in regular education classrooms as well as pull out sessions in the resource room. There were 23 boys and 2 girls. There was Jack, who wore his hair long, so he could hide under it. There was Elliot who craved attention and got it for all the wrong reasons. There was Matt who swore like a truck driver, but was probably the most sensitive of the group. Josh, who somehow has made it to 8th grade while reading at a third grade level. And Andrew, who had a slew of problems that I had never dealt with before. At this time he was known for having kicked the last assistant in the shin and punching her in the stomach. Needless to say, I was afraid of this boy. This boy, who weighed probably 100 pounds, with floppy blonde hair and nails bitten to the quick, scared the breath out of me. It was the eyes that did me in, when he smiled it never reached his eyes, and they were always darting around the room, like he was constantly in search of something or someone. He never looked me in the eye when I spoke to him and he would keep his head low to the desk, almost covering his paper, so I couldn’t get near him or his work. Here’s the thing, though, a little piece of me was falling in love with all of these kids, even Andrew, no especially, Andrew. I think it was their isolation and the fact that no one else loved them. Other teachers in the building did nothing but complain about them, so much so that I stopped going to the teachers’ room for lunch. I signed up for extra lunch duties and got to know my kids outside of the classroom. By the end of the first month, I had made a few strides with the kids and I had faced numerous set backs. I can still remember driving home on route three and crying so hard that I couldn’t see the road. Crying because Josh failed his MCAS or because Tyler got caught with marijuana, or Andrew flipped out in math class and tried to run away. Every day there was an event, but almost every day there was a counter- event that would make me rethink my career path.

At one particular lunch duty in early October, I sat down with my boys and asked if they were going to the dance that night. Most of them laughed me off. “ We don’t do that whole school spirit crap, Guiney.” But I pushed and prodded and got a few of them interested in attending, if for but the lack of anything better to do. Once it was settled that most of them would probably go, someone asked if I was going to chaperone, and then the begging started. To be perfectly honest, I was twenty-two years old at the time and had better plans for a Friday night, but I couldn’t really say no to them.

When I showed up that night about a half hour after the dance started, since I wasn’t actually getting paid to chaperone this event, a row of my boys were on the top step of the gym bleachers. They were singing and swaying to “Don’t Stop Believing” and looked to be having a great time. For me it was the first time I had seen them do something normal and fun, to see them act like regular teenagers. It was Andrew who saw me first and he yelled, “Guiney!” He waved at me like a four year old, a big smile on his face and in his eyes. It was in that moment that I knew teaching was what I wanted to do. Having made this boy smile simply by being present in his life was something I knew I could stake my future on.

That dance, that year, that smile got me to where I am today. It was a great moment born out of something so simple. My mom has always told my brothers, sister, and me that 90% of life is just showing up, the other 10% is what you do when you get where you’re supposed to be. That night I knew that showing up was huge for my kids and for me. The other 10% became what I would do with the rest of my life because I had definitely found where I was supposed to be.