First Day on the Job: Yogurt, Nerves, and a Flying Start
I don’t think anything could’ve prepared me for my first official day as an Educational Assistant.
I was nervous — full-body nervous. New job, new school, new expectations. I was assigned to two different classrooms for half-day shifts and asked to provide a break for another EA who supported a Grade 8 student. Non-verbal. Autistic. Strong-willed. Food-driven. Let’s just say... it was a crash course in how fast things can go sideways — and how important it is to be flexible when they do.
When I arrived to relieve my colleague, she gave me a clear instruction:
“She’s already eaten — no snacks from the bin. None.”
Got it. Easy enough. Or so I thought.
She also let me know that the student liked going to the resource room down the hall. So once she was ready, we could head there. The moment I mentioned it, the student jumped out of her chair, pointed at the door, and bolted into the hallway like she was shot out of a cannon.
I scrambled to keep up — because I had already been told: if she tries to get into a locked room and it’s not open, she gets upset. I hustled ahead of her to make sure the quiet room was ready, but the second I passed her, she pivoted. Quick. Like a track star.
She turned and sprinted back toward the classroom. Straight for the snack bin.
Before I even made it halfway down the hall, she had her hands on a yogurt tube — her prize. I tried to get it back gently. No luck. She was determined. She couldn’t open it herself, though, so I took a breath and said,
“Okay, okay — you can have it. Just let me open it for you.”
Big mistake.
She passed it toward me, and as I reached for it — BOOM. She squeezed. Hard. The yogurt exploded. It hit me. My shirt. My pants. Even the ceiling. I had been on the job for maybe two hours and was already wearing snack.
Welcome to the front lines of education.
It’s funny now, but in that moment, I was mortified. I was covered in yogurt, barely holding it together, and wondering if this was a sign I had made the worst career decision ever. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that this kind of chaos is where some of the most important work happens — in the mess, in the unpredictability, in the split-second decisions.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not quiet. And it’s definitely not clean.
But it’s real. And sometimes, on your first day, real comes in the form of a yogurt rocket launched by a determined Grade 8 girl who just wanted a snack.