That time I chaperoned a Model UN conference
“Are you feeling spontaneous?”
My friend Evan sent me this interest-baiting question Wednesday night. My initial response? No. No, I’m never feeling spontaneous. And as a freelance writer who’d just finished covering New York Fashion Week, I was exhausted and ready for a little West Wing on DVD/nachos/early bedtime combo for the next..well, few days at the very least.
But I’m nothing if not a glutton for punishment, so I wrote back. “Why…?”
A social studies teacher in Florida, he sent me a long-winded message about how he was taking his high school Model UN team (or MUN, as I would soon learn) to Washington DC for a tournament, and the female chaperone had just gotten sick and bowed out. Could I fill in?
Now, I come from a family of strong female teachers. My mother works with learning disabled fourth graders. My sister runs the gifted program at a middle school. My aunt goes all Dangerous Minds with ‘rap as poetry’ lessons on her eighth grade reading class on the regular.
But I am not a teacher. I never wanted to be a teacher. I watched “Mr. Holland’s Opus” and felt nothing, apart from a grateful, good for that guy. Recognizing how f’ing hard the job is, and how much patience working with children demands, I knew it would just be a race to see if I’d kill a student or myself first. I’m just not good with kids. I was the youngest in my family. I never babysat. I like staying behind my computer all day, and socializing exclusively with grownups at night. Apart from my niece, I don’t really know what do around children. And she’s only one and a half so she can’t even tell me how I’m doing.
I could have said no. I could have stayed in New York all weekend and slept in and gone to bed early, gone grocery shopping and hit the gym. But thanks to the aforementioned West Wing addiction, and an innate curiosity about what high school kids are like these days (oh God, did I just write a sentence that basically says “kids these days?”), I thought, yes. Yes this sounds amazing.
Friday afternoon, I boarded the Bolt Bus bound for DC. Because you know what they say about freelancing: the health benefits are shit, but you can decide to go hang out with a bunch of high schoolers’ in our nation’s capital on a day’s notice.
After getting completely lost coming off the metro in Dupont Circle (We can’t get some numbered streets up in hurrr? Sorry “Independence” Avenue, but you don’t help me much), I found my way to the hotel where the conference was being held. I spotted my friend in the lobby, looking exhausted. He was waiting for the kids - fifteen in all - to get out of committee. “Committee?” This sounded intense. He explained that his students weren’t representing just one country’s government, but several different ones. Two sophomores on the Atomic Energy Council were Germany. A junior was serving as the British Prime Minister in the House of Commons (or he was when I showed up. by the end of the weekend, he’d been ousted by the opposition party, only to have the new prime minister kidnapped by radical extremists fighting for immigration reform, so I think he got off easy). A lone senior was working on behalf of Slovenia in the World Health Organization.
As kids trickled out of the conference rooms they’d been holed up in all day, I got to meet my charges. A cherubic-faced Asian kid with Justin Bieber hair spewed a tirade against a Bolivian-American coalition that had shot down his amendments in that day’s session, then turned purposefully to me.
“Megan?” He stuck out his hand for me to shake. “Hi, it’s so great to meet you. How was your trip?”
Soon more kids filtered out, and each was equally enthusiastic about both MUN and about meeting me. They were polite, but not overly so. This wasn’t a “Children of the Corn” situation; these kids were kids - just really, really smart ones.
My friend teaches at a private school, the kind where kids show up in new SUVs on their sixteenth birthdays. Where kids are told by their retired-at-35 parents that they could be anything they wanted to in life, and who were then expected to go out and start making it happen by the time they reach middle school. I was impressed that my friend wasn’t jaded by all this. He was more excited to talk about the schools his seniors had gotten into - Duke, Harvard, Dartmouth, and on and on. One of the girls on the trip, a bright, Leslie Knope-type had just gotten into the Naval Acadmey. The Naval Academy.
My job was easy. I would be responsible for walking kids to and from the conference, to our hotel, about ten minutes away. Friday night, I walked half the kids to and from an ice cream social. I sat in a chair against a wall in a large ballroom and ate a sundae while watching a bunch of brainy high schoolers socialize. Earlier in the day these kids had been debating oil prices and now they were running around, like, well, children. Children that had probably scored considerably higher than I had on the SATs and may make more money their first year out of college, but children.
Around me, chaperones closing in on middle age - and a few who had already left it in their rearview mirror - sat doing the same. I was one of them now, it struck me (though strangely, didn’t scare me).
On the walks to and from the hotel, the students would fill me in on all the latest, context be damned. Who was friends with who. What school was like. Whose house everyone hung out at. What they wanted to be when they grew up. What music they listened to. And it was amazing. They just…volunteered all this information. These kids were well-adjusted, maybe not a whole lot of self-awareness (It probably didn’t need it pointed out to me when they were talking about Sam P’s birthday party and not Sam F’s, since I didn’t know Sam P or Sam F, but I appreciated the attention to detail.)
I had showed up with the notion that these kids would be nerds. Like, trouble looking pretty girls in the eye/never played a sport in their lives for lack of hand-eye coordination, hardcore nerds. But these kids weren’t nerds. These boys did MUN and played football. The girls were comfortable talking to adults and good at doing makeup already. They hovered somewhere between innocent teen and wise-before-their years grownup. These kids were awesome.
I got in on Friday night and left on Sunday morning, and - apart from Saturday breakfast and dinner (where I gained their lifelong respect for demanding free cheesy bread after an Italian restaurant seated us twenty minutes late for our reservation), I didn’t even really see them that much. That’s why when, at dinner, I was so surprised when the table suddenly got quiet and the Naval Academy-bound Leslie Knope quieted the table and addressed me. “Megan, we want to thank you so much for coming and helping us this weekend. This has honestly been the most fun MUN conference ever, because of you.”
Because of little ol’ me? She handed me a t-shirt from the conference (a big hashtag made up of smaller MUN-minded hashtags like #sustainability #diplomacy and #immunity) and a thank you card, which I knew I couldn’t open up till later because it might actually make me cry.
“My kids gave me a card!” I texted a friend that night. “Your kids?” she responded. “I know! I’m someone who says “my kids” now!”
As I left for the bus station Sunday morning, I glanced at a MUN student’s laminated nametag, the same one everyone wore all weekend. It read, “NAIMUN XIIX,” with the student’s name under it. All weekend, I’d puzzled over the name. At first, I thought it was the name of a Chinese delegation, but then everyone’s had it, so I assumed the conference was named after some Chinese ambassador or something? All of a sudden, it dawned on me. NAI - North American Association… MUN - Model United Nations…XIIX”… the year. And this is why I wasn’t in Model UN when I was their age.
“my kids”
