Fourth grade, and the lie that made me learn computers

This is the big one. Fourth grade is the most loaded year of my childhood, and I want to lay it out in as much detail as I can, because part of the point of this whole site is that someday it might be a record. Not just my life, but how a place worked, how a town grew, how kids actually lived. So I am going to write down even the small stuff on purpose.

In the summer of 1997 we moved from St. John to Lake St. Louis, which meant a new house, a new school, and a whole new district. And I want to document what that district was, because it has changed almost beyond recognition. When I arrived, the Wentzville district was small: roughly two elementary schools, two middle schools, two high schools. Today it has four high schools (Holt, Timberland, Liberty, and North Point), four middle schools, and twelve elementary schools, serving something like eighteen thousand students. I genuinely no longer know where all the elementary schools even are. (When I guessed, before checking, I said there were probably twelve elementaries now. There are exactly twelve. I will take it.)

The building with a forbidden half

My school was Wentzville West Elementary. The way I understood it, the building had lived a few lives before mine, the high school once, then the junior high, before it became our elementary, though I cannot fully vouch for that lineage. What I can tell you is that it was enormous. So enormous that they split it into two schools inside one building: East Elementary and West Elementary. I was West.

And here is the thing that still gets to me. We were told, flatly, that we were never, under any circumstances, allowed to go into the East side. So in the two years I went there, fourth grade and fifth, I never once saw the inside of East Elementary. For a kid who loved nothing more than to explore and see things, that forbidden half of my own building was a small, permanent itch.

Getting there was a journey. In St. John, school had been five blocks away, deep in territory I knew by heart. Now the bus hauled us from Lake St. Louis all the way to Wentzville, across actual interstates, which to a nine-year-old felt like crossing a frontier. You would get off the bus, walk across a giant paved lot that doubled as the kickball and four square courts, past wooden playground equipment sitting in a bed of rocks and pebbles (the cheerfully dangerous equipment of the 90s), through the double doors at the seam where East met West, and bear right into the West side.

Mrs. Kaimann

My teacher was Mrs. Kaimann. She was tall and slender, warm and friendly, and it was one of her very first years teaching. I liked her.

Early in the year she announced she was pregnant, and the girls in the class adopted her as a project on the spot. All year it was, do not get up, we will get that, sit down. It is going to matter later, so hold that thought.

The things they taught us between the lessons

The multiplication chart followed me here. There was a poster on the wall, and when you mastered a times table you got a sticker on your row, so everyone could see exactly how everyone else was doing. My row was humiliatingly empty. I could pass the twos, the fives, and the tens, the freebies, while other kids had gold stars marching all the way across. (Same old story. The multiplication tapes had not saved me in third grade, and they did not save me here.)

This was the class where I learned Heads Down Thumbs Up, the game where a few kids walk the room tapping thumbs while everyone hides their eyes, and the tapped ones have to guess who got them. Kids cheated constantly, peeking under their arms at shoes and pant legs. If you suspected a peeker, you never picked them. I made a point of never cheating.

And this was the class where I learned to never fully trust a test again. We were handed one of those two sided sheets with a line at the very top: read all instructions before doing anything. Nobody read it, of course. So we all charged in, flipped the page, worked our way down, until somewhere around question 35 it said, roughly: do not answer any of these. Just write your name at the top of page one, sit quietly, and do not tell anyone how the test works. Getting to that line felt like a small betrayal, and for years afterward I read every test braced for the trick, sure that at any moment a teacher or a boss was going to reveal it had all been a joke. (It never happened again. Once was enough.)

There was a classroom economy too, fake money you earned and spent at a fake store, with auctions and knickknacks, meant to teach us how money works. The catch was that a lot of the earning came from donating things or buying in, and our family did not have the money for that, so my account stayed thin while richer kids loaded up. I did eventually save enough to win a few odds and ends, and honestly it is not a bad memory, just an early, clear lesson in not having as much as the kid next to you. There were popcorn parties with an educational show, and ice cream parties where moms volunteered and visibly wrestled with the ice cream scoop. As an adult with a fancy heat-conducting scooper, I think about those poor struggling moms more than I should.

The lie that made me

Here is the story this whole post is really about. I have only told it to a few people. If you somehow found this and you were in my fourth grade class: yes. It was me.

One day, mid math, someone wheeled in a crate with a brand new all in one Macintosh in it, one of those heavy CRT machines, an LC 575 or a Performa, something in that family. The teacher’s eyes lit up, and she turned to the room and asked: does anyone here know anything about computers? Does anyone know how to set one up?

I looked around. No hands. So I raised mine, and I lied. I had a real, genuine interest in computers by then, but I did not actually know how to set one up. I am not sure we even had one at home yet. She told me that while everyone else did the math homework, I could set up the computer.

So this little fourth grader hauled what felt like a small refrigerator out of the box, plugged in the keyboard and the mouse, and worked through the whole operating system setup until I hit the desktop. It worked. She was thrilled, and handed me a box of games to install: Carmen Sandiego, Math Munchers, that sort of thing. And then the last one, SimCity. To this day I am not certain whether it was the original or SimCity 2000.

It was one of those games that needed the floppy in the drive to verify you owned it. On that Mac OS, to get a disk out, you went to the Special menu, where two commands sat dangerously close together: Eject Disk, and Erase Disk. Most commercial floppies had the little write-protect lock flipped so this could not happen. This one, somehow, did not. I went up to Special, meant to eject, and clicked Erase Disk. It asked if I was sure. I did not read it. I clicked yes.

The drive started zipping along, the progress bar filling, and my stomach dropped. By the time I found Cancel it was far too late. I had wiped the disk. I quietly put it back in its box, closed the lid, raised my hand, and announced that the computer and the games were all set up.

For the rest of the year, kids would slot in the SimCity disk, get a message asking them to insert the SimCity disk, and come to me baffled. Todd, it will not work, what did you do, how did you get it going? And every time I lied again: I do not know, it never actually worked when I set it up. I probably destroyed a sixty dollar game on day one. Everything else ran flawlessly.

But that low hum of dread all year, the lying, the being asked things I could not answer, it did something to me. I made myself a promise that I have basically never broken: I never want to be caught not knowing like that again. It became a mission to learn everything I possibly could about computers. That embarrassment is the exact thing that threw the doors open, websites, programs, Windows, the Mac, all of it. I cannot prove I would not have gotten there anyway. But I know that mistake is what made me run. (The long version of where that road led is on the history page.)

Computer class, and the magazines

We also had a real computer class upstairs with a teacher named Miss Farmer, rows of big all in one Macs, the fridge sized kind with the speakers and the microphone ports. They were locked down with At Ease, the system that hid the real desktop behind giant friendly icons so kids could not break anything, though, notably, the machine in my own classroom was not locked down like that. We played Math Munchers, Oregon Trail, Super Solvers Midnight Rescue. And at the back of the room were the Scholastic magazines, the ones with pages of games and software you could order for home. I could look through those forever.

Art, music, and the principal

Art class I loved, and the art teacher was, I am fairly sure, McKenzie’s mom, who was wonderful. Music was a different story. There were two music teachers, one famously strict, and I lucked into the newer, kinder one. With no strings program at this school, the cello was over for me, and instead we all learned the recorder, that little two piece plastic flute, and sang songs, which was actually a good time.

And every single morning the principal opened the announcements with the same line: make it a great day, or not, the choice is yours. I came to genuinely hate that phrase, mostly because of how relentlessly she said it. She always struck me as a person on a bit of a power trip.

McKenzie, and starting to feel a little different

I made a friend named McKenzie, and the two of us used to walk the far edge of the playground, balancing along the wooden border between the concrete and the pebbles, just talking. It was around then, on those slow laps, that I first got the quiet sense that I might be a little different from the other kids. I am fully out now, so I can say that plainly. Back then it was just a faint, wordless feeling. But fourth grade is where it started.

Camp, and the baby

Fourth grade ended with a week of camp, the kind where they ship you off to do outdoorsy things. I was not an outdoorsy kid, so I was lukewarm on the whole idea. It was also my first taste of body self consciousness, sharing a cabin with six or seven other boys, changing and showering around each other. Nothing more than plain embarrassment, just the very beginning of, this is weird, I do not want to do this in front of everyone.

Now, remember Mrs. Kaimann being pregnant? As camp got closer, the girls grew adamant: you cannot come, you will end up having that baby in the middle of nowhere. She insisted she was fine, not due, and that she wanted to be there. I think by the second night of camp she went into labor and got rushed off to a hospital. The girls were insufferably vindicated, we told you so. We finished the year with substitutes, and she came back at the very end with the baby so we could all meet it.

Mike

The last and most important thing about fourth grade is that this is the class where I met Mike, who became my best friend through elementary, middle, and high school. He was into technology too. When I first met him, his family was renting a house while their real one was being built, and he had taped an 8.5 by 11 sheet, printed out of Microsoft Word, to the back door: something like, welcome Todd, my new best friend. I have rarely felt so instantly welcomed in my life.

Here is the heartbreak of it, though. Fourth grade was the first and very nearly the last time we were ever in the same class. Our school system kept us apart for years, and at the time I thought it was just bad luck, the random draw never landing us together no matter how hard I wished and prayed for it. What I was too young to understand was that it was not random at all. Mike was in a different academic track. He eventually graduated number one in our class. I spent a long time near the bottom, until high school, which is a story for another day. He was simply in a higher tier of classes, and that, not chance, is what kept us in separate rooms.

So our whole friendship lived outside of school. We networked our computers together and played Age of Empires, built little programs, learned hardware, played the Sims in parallel and then compared notes, built cities in SimCity, went to each other’s birthdays. We both got made fun of plenty, at different times, and I think that bonded us, two kids keeping each other steady. I would still love to write a whole post just about Mike someday. For now he gets to live here, in the year we met.

The bus, and a piece of candy

One more thing from these years, because it is one of my favorite small memories. Our bus driver back then was an older gentleman, and our stop was the very last one on the route, last picked up in the morning, which meant I got to sleep in, and last dropped off in the afternoon. The bus had no air conditioning, so on hot days everyone slid their windows down, and at the end of his long shift he did not much feel like walking the aisle closing them all himself. So he made us a deal: if the handful of us still on the bus near the end rolled every window back up before our stop, he would hand out candy.

It became a ritual. As the second-to-last kids climbed off, someone would shout “windows, windows,” and we would swarm the bus yanking every window up, ganging up on the stuck ones that would not budge, all to earn that piece of candy. I loved it.

And since this is meant to be the honest version of my life: somewhere in here, I got in trouble on that bus. I said a word an eight-year-old has no business saying, the F-word, aimed at another kid, and naturally I got told on. The driver, looking disappointed, handed me a slip to take home. It said I had said it, and that one more would mean detention. I was a good kid who could not stand the thought of my parents being let down, so, with absolutely no foresight, I dropped the slip down a sewer grate on the walk home and then prayed like my life depended on it. I promised I would never curse again, and for a good while I actually didn’t.

And it worked out. Nobody ever brought it up again, not the driver, not my parents, nobody. Maybe he was only writing slips to scare kids straight and never filed it. Maybe he forgot, he was getting on in years. Maybe my parents got their own copy and just shrugged it off. I will never know, because I am never going to ask. But I crossed my heart, asked for help, and the universe quietly let it go. I have long since made my peace with cursing. I just try to keep it among friends.

That is fourth grade, or most of it. The biggest, busiest, most formative year I had. There is more, and I will come back and fill it in. But if you only remember one thing from this entry, make it the erased disk. Everything I am came partly from that.