Students, Undaunted, Return to School Life

They were silly and apprehensive, frequently thoughtful and even a little obnoxious, but mostly these teenagers showed resilience by reveling in their very adolescence.

Nine days ago, all these adult children--with their cell phones, blotchy skin and high IQs--peered through Stuyvesant High School’s windows and saw the ugliness at the World Trade Center in a way that could not be captured on television. They saw fireballs roaring from the twin towers; they saw people leaping hand in hand; they smelled the smoke choking the sky above them.

The 3,011 students trooped back to temporary classrooms Thursday, determined not to allow a collective horror stand in the way of their collective promise.

For almost 100 years, Stuyvesant has drawn from among New York’s smartest students. Background, influence and income do not matter. The only criterion for admission is one grinding, 2 1/2-hour entrance exam, and the result has long been a student body that ranks top in the nation. Year after year, Stuyvesant has produced about 70 National Merit Scholars out of a senior class of 700.

This strict meritocracy has also produced a range of students from all five New York City boroughs--and around the world.

Himanshu Suri, whose Indian mother sells life insurance, lives in Flushing, Queens; Irene Chu, whose parents run a laundry, lives in Green Point, Brooklyn; Roman Trimba, a Russian immigrant whose father is a doctor, lives in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

“The fact we haven’t had school, you know, classes, well, I didn’t like that,” said Suri, the student union vice president. “All we could do was sit around and watch the same disturbing images on TV that we saw that day with our own eyes.”

In those moments, they witnessed a collision of two global strands: One is the the flow of people who come to the United States for its values and way of life. The other is a flow of violence directed at America--also for its values and way of life.

But Trimba and his friends, in their T-shirts, baggy pants and sneakers, were holding fast to their innocence Thursday, as they reviewed their class schedules and tried to figure out how they would function without the textbooks still in their lockers. They would not concede that anything in their lives had really changed. They would not concede that this was “any big deal.”

Instead, they talked about classes shortened from 40 minutes to 26 minutes for the next two weeks while they share Brooklyn Technical School’s building, near downtown Brooklyn, with its 4,000 students. They’ll split shifts, with the Tech kids going 7:15 a.m. to 1:47 p.m. and the Stuyvesant kids going from 1 to 6:11 p.m. In the meantime, Stuyvesant’s buildings on the Hudson River are being used by rescue workers.

Standing in the driving rain, the students joked about who is better, “Stuy students,” as they call themselves, or “the Techies.”

They also made fun of the principal’s suggestion that some might want to seek counseling.

“Would I go to some counselor knowing that if anyone found out they’d call me a, you know, a whatever?” Trimba, 15, asked his buddies.

“Nah,” said Kirill Satanofsky, 15, also a child of Russian immigrants.

“No way,” Albert Levi, 15, said. And then he said something in Russian to the other boys and they all laughed.

With his sweet smile, however, Levi was also willing to offer a hint of vulnerability. “It was pretty bad if you think about it,” he said, “but we can’t think about it now.”

Chu, a senior, and her friends Lida Shao and Eric Lai were a little more willing to ponder the larger problems of their world and of their city.

They said they were struck by how all their earlier concerns--about college application deadlines and senior “pajama day” and senior “cut day”--had been forgotten for a while.

“It makes us feel bad caring about little things now,” Chu said. “Like Eric didn’t get his senior picture taken that day and he had come to school in a suit.”

“A lot of kids were in suits when we evacuated school,” said Lai, who was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans Thursday.

Shao, whose father works at the United Nations, said she misses being at their beautiful big school.

“It’s so spacious and comfy,” she said, describing the relatively new Stuyvesant campus with its three gyms, 77 classrooms, 12 science labs, 40,000-volume library and marble hallways that resemble the tony financial buildings in the neighborhood.

“There is so much there we love,” she said.

But then she withdrew her thoughts, as she said, “from the personal” and snapped back “to the big stuff.”

“I was really glad when I read that the president of China had announced he wanted ‘irrefutable evidence’ and U.N. backing before we invaded anyone,” she said.

“It’s so weird to be from this liberal school,” Chu added, “and this liberal city, and hear kids we know talking in person or online about retaliation and revenge.”