Jan. 18, 2006

Tempers are flaring. Someone&8217;s butting into someone else&8217;s life again. So-and-so stole so-and-so&8217;s boyfriend. Jealousy is king. What&8217;s-her-name is leaving town. And the drama is suffocating.

Sound like the undercurrents to every storyline on your favorite soap opera? Sounds like a fourth-grade classroom to me.

I was told last week by a reader that the column on Mrs. Tuccio&8217;s class was like a soap opera, and she just couldn&8217;t wait to see what would happen next week.

Thank goodness these kids are such good material, but I don&8217;t think they realize it.

Much like the soap opera characters stuck inside a box in our living rooms, these children are just living their lives, saying what they think and acting how they feel. That&8217;s why it so interesting.

Personalities are amazing things. Personality flaws I could do without. Once adults start realizing their flaws, they work &8212; not always succeeding &8212; to overcome them, or at least hide them in certain circumstances.

Kids do no such thing. It&8217;s raw soap opera drama.

Twenty-three columns into our year-long soap, there are probably a few names from the class you recognize instantly, New Orleans native Tempestt for one.

I&8217;ve mentioned Jesse, Sidney and Brianna quite a few times too.

But it&8217;s not the names that matter (unless you are them; they love getting their names in the paper). It&8217;s the types of children they represent that we can all relate to. Any soap watcher knows you can stop watching for two years and turn on the TV one day and pick right back up in the character&8217;s lives. That&8217;s because each soap character fits a character-type.

I&8217;d venture to say nearly every Miss-Lou classroom has a Jesse (the happy, loveable one), a Sidney (the smart, confident one) and a Brianna (the sweet, friendly one).

There are some other personalities worth getting to know, too:

Walter Turner Jr. &8212; Something about saying the full name describes this child to a T. He&8217;s the cool one, and he knows it.

Terrica Fleming &8212; The perfectionist. I&8217;d hate to be the teacher who handed her an assignment with a B instead of an A.

Ayana Larry &8212; The prissy beauty. She looks and acts like a little, breakable doll. Her fashion sense is New York runway all the way.

Kenneth Thomas &8212; The gentleman who does as he&8217;s told.

Of course, there&8217;s more than one who fits the troublemaker bill. There&8217;s the quiet one. The class clown. The troubled one. And the outsider.

Throw them together, confine them to a classroom seven hours a day, add a teacher and you&8217;ve got your very own soap opera. What should we call it? Days of our Lives &8212; whoops, been done. As the Classroom Turns &8212; lame. Tuccio&8217;s Tribe?

I&8217;ve got it &8212; the Young and the Restless. OK, OK, it&8217;s been done, too, but, come on, it fits.

There&8217;s a bulletin board outside Ms. Bell&8217;s doorway that has pictures of each of the children. Newspaper writers don&8217;t like to admit to the photographers that a picture truly is worth a thousand words (it&8217;s like talking yourself out of a job), but one look at these photos and I bet you could match them with my descriptions of the kids.

The body language is overwhelming. The pictures convey confidence, shyness and just plain trouble. You can tell who is friends with whom, and who&8217;d rather just be alone.

These children are open books that I&8217;ve shared with you, and they don&8217;t mind. In their heads, they have nothing to hide.

In the meantime, we adults are scampering around trying to hide personality flaws left and right, (including drawing the curtains to watch our soaps so no one will know).

Maybe the kids&8217; be-yourself-living style is best. After all, we only have one life to live.

Julie Finley is the education reporter for The Natchez Democrat. She writes a weekly column based on experiences with Marty Tuccio&8217;s homeroom class at McLaurin Elementary. She can be reached at 601-445-3551 or

julie.finley@natchezdemocrat.com

.