THE NEW KID IN CLASS

Miami Herald, The (FL)
April 2, 1989
Author: TOM SHRODER Herald Tropic Editor

When we assigned T.M. Shine (the kids in school call him Terry) to spend a week as the new boy in fourth grade, we didn't know what he'd find. I guess it shouldn't have surprised us that what he discovered was . . . fourth grade. His and everyone else's, just lying there under the dust of forgetfulness. This was Shine's second shot at fourth grade. The first time around, 22 years ago, Shine was in Miss Whitman's class, and he was always afraid. Of being known. "I never wanted the teacher to call on me because I didn't want to be exposed, but I would mumble things to the person next to me. I'd make little remarks that I'd planned out, days ahead of time sometimes. I'd just sit there waiting for the right moment to mumble them. The people immediately next to me would laugh and get in trouble. The teacher never suspected me."

Shine has maintained that ability to blend into the walls, even when he outweighs everyone else by 50 pounds. The first day he walked into class and the teacher -- with no prompting from Terry -- said simply, "Class, I'd like you to meet our new student." There were a few giggles as he wedged himself into the pint-size desk, but by the end of the week, Terry was nothing more to his classmates than the only kid in the class with 3-o- clock shadow.

"I got right back into it," he said. "In no time I was scared the teacher was going to call on me, afraid I'd get caught not paying attention. Nothing had changed."

It turned out that the most striking difference between fourth grade now and fourth grade a generation ago turns out not to be inside the classroom, but outside. When I was in fourth grade, Shine writes, "strange men in suits didn't come to the school every other week to frighten me away from the dangers of life."

When my grade-schooler comes home worried about the greenhouse effect and the ozone layer, I don't know what to tell her. I can't honestly reassure her that her lifetime will be free of cataclysm. I can't bring myself to say, "There's nothing to be afraid of."

Shine made me think about my own childhood, a time when the world seemed stable, when you couldn't see the future crumbling before your eyes. Our country was vast, unspoiled, and omnipotent. Instead of pollution and crime, the teachers talked about the limitless riches technology was about to bestow on all of us. What pained me was not so much that the optimism turned out to be false as it was that my own children had to live with the diminished truth.

I felt a pang of guilt that I had had it so much better, with so much less to worry about.

Then I remembered something. The year I attended fourth grade: 1963.

Funny thing. My reveries of stability had neatly excised that moment when we were baking cookies for Thanksgiving that our teacher appeared, her face distorted, to tell us that the president had been murdered. And the times my heart pounded when the special horn sounded that would signal a nuclear attack -- when I crouched pitifully beneath my desk with no future but the linoleum in front of my face until they reiterated that this was only a test. I had somehow forgotten all those nights when I went to sleep certain I would never grow up.

What I remembered instead was the weird new guy in Mrs. Knee's fourth grade who was building a laser in his basement. And a girl named Erica.

Shine fell in love in fourth grade, too. With Nancy, Bonnie and Sue: "I stayed in love with them all through high school, loved them all equally, but I never told them or anyone else that I liked them. I had this problem -- a cute fat face. All the wrong girls liked me. The girls I liked would say to my face, 'You're not so cute.'

"Nothing was hidden in fourth grade."

No. It only gets obscured after the fact, after we've become adept at pretending that we've grown up to be an entirely different kind of creature from the frightened, puzzled beings who stepped off the bus day after day, with unfathomable courage, to face the unknown.

Memo: FROM THE EDITOR
Section: TROPIC
Copyright (c) 1989 The Miami Herald