10 years can be a long time ...

Yesterday, I spent two hours of my personal time crammed in the school's cafeteria with 300 sweaty adolescents jumping and gyrating to blaring music.

The sponsoring teachers for the event (the ones who got paid to be there because their student organization had planned it) had bribed us with free "unlimited" pizza, candy, and beverages. Alas, the students consumed all of the above before I had even learned it had arrived. No compensation (i.e. "free dinner!" - a very exciting promise to someone who still holds to the frugal philosophies of a college student) after all. :-(

When I first walked into the cafeteria, I immediately had flashbacks to my own middle school dances. Loud music, crowds of people. Guys in their own crowds, girls in their own crowds, rarely mingling.

My good friend in sixth grade arrived to our first dance (Fall 1996) in a lovely white party dress with matching heels and a fancy purse. She apparently hadn't gotten the verbal memo from the "big kids" (seventh and eighth graders) that everybody wore jeans to these events.

I remember the Spring of 1997 at one of the dances ... I wore a cute little orangeish/pinkish dress, except that the skirt part of the dress was actually skorts. (What would you call that?) I can distinctly picture this memory of listening to the Fun Factory's "I Wanna Be With You" song blaring in the gym (our dances were held in the gym at my middle school.) As the music blared, I was singing along, standing in a semi-circle with my friends, and I was positioned perfectly to see my little sixth grade crush (who is now a married father). I pretended I was singing to him and all my friends teased me about him.

I think back to my Eighth Grade Dance in Spring 1999 - the big formal event for middle school kids. It's a mini-Prom for teenyboppers. That night was the first night I danced with a boy. A friend from my community theatre group invited me to dance the last dance, and I accepted. He was nice enough, and we were friends- no romantic feelings whatsoever. We'd been dancing for maybe thirty seconds of the song (standing at least a foot apart with our arms awkwardly around each other) when another girl from our theatre group came over.

"C!" She said to him. "You promised to dance with me at least one song tonight, and they said this is the last song!" To me, she said,

"You don't mind, do you, Estrella?" She was a friend of mine too, and I was disappointed. This was the first time I'd ever been asked to dance by a boy, and I'd seen her dancing with other guys at the dance already. I said that it was fine if he wanted to dance with her, so he did.
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Flash forward to 2008: Now I'm a middle school teacher, serving as a chaperone to kids who are not much different than I was a mere 10 years ago.

It broke my heart to see the kids without groups of friends ... one little girl sitting by herself, just watching the others dance .... the little boy who is so adorably awkward but so sweet-natured, the little bossy girl who was walking around by herself. The last child I described always seems so bored and unhappy in my class, and I've always gotten the impression that she doesn't like me. To my surprise, she came up to me and had a long and pleasant conversation with me. She seems lonely ... and I'm trying to figure out which kid I can move next to her in class who would easygoing enough that he/she would tolerate this little girl's bossiness and attitude and perhaps try to reach out to her.

Some kids actually acknowledged my presence there ("Hi Miss LastName!!!!"), and one of my sweet sixth graders even gave me a hug. ("Sorry I'm so sweaty, Miss LastName, but I've been dancing the whole time!!!") That little hug made up for the good/bad flashbacks and the lack of pizza. Still, I'm relieved to know that I'm already unavailable on the date of the next dance, so I won't be able to volunteer to help again until after the New Year. Darn. :-)