Off the Top of My Head Online (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} otmh) wrote,@ 2006-06-22 17:51:00 |
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June 20, 2006 - Twenty Years Ago (Part I: "Gifted & Talented")
It was twenty years ago today
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play
They've been going in and out of style
But they're guaranteed to raise a smile
In the first grade, I was identified as a "gifted and talented student". I say this not as any sort of boast - what can it possibly matter now, almost 30 years later? - but so you'll know where I'm coming from here. In the 1970s, the idea of special school programs for the so-called "gifted and talented", or G&T as they were known in the shorthand of the local school district, were becoming the rage in Maine's public schools. The idea was that, through some selection method I've long since forgotten - standardized testing, probably - the students who happened to fall under the far-right end of the bell curve would be culled from the herd and sent, for a few hours each week, to special classes dubbed "Quest" where, presumably, their Greater Potential could be cultivated.
In theory, it was some kind of honor to be singled out, like being selected as an embryo to be an Alpha in the test-tube society of Huxley's Brave New World. ("Oh, no, I don't want to play with Delta children...") In practice, it was basically the mark of Cain. Grade school students don't care if you're "special"; they only know that you're different and react accordingly - that is to say, with resentment, alienation, and occasionally outright hostility. Who were these eggheads who got to skip out of regular classes and go down the hall? Why were they held up by proud teachers as some kind of example of superiority? What was the mysterious tribe called Quest? The only other kids who get to skip out of regular classes for special instruction are the short-bus kids.
To be honest, the program itself was a bit uninspiring. The only thing I remember clearly about it now was that we played Dungeons & Dragons - the stripped-down Basic Set version - under teacher supervision, which must surely count as one of the most ridiculous things ever done in a classroom under the pretense of education. Well, all right, if pressed I'll admit I remember the names of some of the other activities we did - American Great Books, Bloom's Taxonomy, some kind of allegorical logic thing featuring a character named Stotlemeyer - but I have no idea what they constituted any more. Only the names have stuck with me, and the fact that the program was, for most of my elementary-school career, taught by a somewhat loopy new-age earth-mama type who insisted on hugs in the classroom, which may go a great deal toward explaining my present disdain for hippies, crystal-gazers, and Ye Olde Modyrne Wytches.
Anyway. The G&T program in my school district, back in the day, sort of dead-ended after the fifth grade. The designation was still there, and in other places there were continuing programs in middle and even high schools, but in Millinocket there didn't seem to be much interest in that kind of thing. Maybe the money wasn't there; maybe the principal of the middle school didn't believe in the concept - I don't know.
For whatever reason, there weren't any special classes beyond the fifth grade, and I was glad enough for that. Sixth grade was when you got a locker and a homeroom, and started moving around the building from class to class, rather than being taught all subjects in a single room by a single teacher; it was a very different experience, considered something of a rite of passage. It was tough enough just dealing with all the shuffling around the building and the fact that two-thirds of the grade were suddenly strangers (back then Millinocket had three grade schools that all fed into a single middle school).
As I said, though, the designation remained, tucked away in the infamous and secretive Permanent Records of those of us who had been in the Quest cadre back in elementary school, along with - we were routinely assured - evidence of every fight we'd ever been in, every time we had dared defy the will of a teacher, every visit to the principal's office, and the time I'd played a record backward1 while deejaying at the school radio station in the fourth grade. We were marked, and we were periodically reminded of it - and in the seventh grade a group of us were suddenly and strangely asked to do something entirely out of step with where we were in our school careers.
As part of a program operated by a center for gifted youth out of Johns Hopkins University, we were asked - ordered, really, I don't recall it ever being presented as optional - to take the SAT.
The SAT, the Scholastic Aptitude Test - a phrase to make high school juniors tremble, even more so now that they've made the test even longer, put in essay questions (the bane of test-takers and test-scorers alike), and taken out those great "GERMANY is to BELGIUM as WILT CHAMBERLAIN is to:" questions2. This was a test people in the impossibly distant eleventh grade had to take if they wanted to get into college, not something for seventh-graders to concern themselves with.
But concern myself with it I did. I had to. It was presented to me that if I bypassed this Unique Opportunity, I would be behaving in a deeply ungrateful fashion - that my parents hadn't slaved away for all those years so that I could decline any chance at a Better Life that might come my way. Understand, I grew up in an industrial town, but my parents weren't wage workers. Mom was a teacher and Dad an engineer, both college-educated, well-paid professionals. It wasn't a "you'll end up working at the tire factory like I do" sort of situation, but that was a bit what it felt like. My father has the unique ability to do things like that - sit at the kitchen table and imply with a straight face that classic "if you don't go to college, you'll end up like me" scenario, where in reality ending up like him would involve, among other things, a college degree. At any rate, it was put to me that if I didn't do this thing, I would regret it for the rest of my life.
As it happens, that was probably true, but not in the way my parents intended it.
Anyway, I took the test. It seemed to take forever and I was convinced when it was over that I had made a complete botch of it and would never be taken seriously in any academic context ever again. We heard nothing for months. Then a letter came, one day, congratulating me on my excellent scores and inviting me to participate in a variety of summer programs operated by the university in various places, including the main campus itself.
Those options were right out as far as I was concerned. I didn't know much about the outside world at the tender age of 12, but one thing I knew was that I had no interest in spending several weeks alone, in summer, in a place like Baltimore. In the 1980s, you would never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. David Simon would write Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets in Baltimore only a few years later. Johns Hopkins probably isn't in a bad part of town (though that's not a given - the College of the Holy Cross is in the absolute worst part of Worcester), but that wasn't a chance I was prepared to take at 12.
On the other hand, they did have an interesting-looking literature program running for a couple of weeks at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. That wasn't too far from home, only a couple of hours, and Bar Harbor certainly wasn't the sort of place where people got into knife fights in the streets (back then, anyway). I couldn't really be said to have had much interest in spending part of my precious summer vacation doing anything school-related, but I could at least be persuaded to go to the College of the Atlantic thing.
It was the first time I'd ever been away from home without my parents around, not counting several-day stays with my grandparents. I went into it, as I recall, with more resignation than excitement, taking it on more as a duty to make my parents and the Educational Authorities back home happy than any kind of personal adventure. It was a little like the mindset I expect people who are going to prison try to adopt: get in, don't draw attention from the really bad dudes, stay out of trouble, get out alive.
My mother was excited for both of us. "This is going to be a wonderful experience for you," she said. "You'll make friends and have a great time."
In Mom's defense, .333 is a pretty good batting average.
1 I hadn't - I had the 45-RPM single of Napoleon XIV's 1966 hit "They're Coming to Take Me Away" that had a backward recording of the song on the B-side - but I could never get Principal Sanders to believe that I hadn't tampered with the turntable. "Do you have any idea what those things cost? This is why schools won't have student radio stations soon." And he was quite right. Well, I'm not sure he was right about the why of it, but the one remaining grade school in town does not, in fact, have a student radio station now.
2 "20,000 WOMEN", supposedly.
It was twenty years ago today
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play
They've been going in and out of style
But they're guaranteed to raise a smile
In the first grade, I was identified as a "gifted and talented student". I say this not as any sort of boast - what can it possibly matter now, almost 30 years later? - but so you'll know where I'm coming from here. In the 1970s, the idea of special school programs for the so-called "gifted and talented", or G&T as they were known in the shorthand of the local school district, were becoming the rage in Maine's public schools. The idea was that, through some selection method I've long since forgotten - standardized testing, probably - the students who happened to fall under the far-right end of the bell curve would be culled from the herd and sent, for a few hours each week, to special classes dubbed "Quest" where, presumably, their Greater Potential could be cultivated.
In theory, it was some kind of honor to be singled out, like being selected as an embryo to be an Alpha in the test-tube society of Huxley's Brave New World. ("Oh, no, I don't want to play with Delta children...") In practice, it was basically the mark of Cain. Grade school students don't care if you're "special"; they only know that you're different and react accordingly - that is to say, with resentment, alienation, and occasionally outright hostility. Who were these eggheads who got to skip out of regular classes and go down the hall? Why were they held up by proud teachers as some kind of example of superiority? What was the mysterious tribe called Quest? The only other kids who get to skip out of regular classes for special instruction are the short-bus kids.
To be honest, the program itself was a bit uninspiring. The only thing I remember clearly about it now was that we played Dungeons & Dragons - the stripped-down Basic Set version - under teacher supervision, which must surely count as one of the most ridiculous things ever done in a classroom under the pretense of education. Well, all right, if pressed I'll admit I remember the names of some of the other activities we did - American Great Books, Bloom's Taxonomy, some kind of allegorical logic thing featuring a character named Stotlemeyer - but I have no idea what they constituted any more. Only the names have stuck with me, and the fact that the program was, for most of my elementary-school career, taught by a somewhat loopy new-age earth-mama type who insisted on hugs in the classroom, which may go a great deal toward explaining my present disdain for hippies, crystal-gazers, and Ye Olde Modyrne Wytches.
Anyway. The G&T program in my school district, back in the day, sort of dead-ended after the fifth grade. The designation was still there, and in other places there were continuing programs in middle and even high schools, but in Millinocket there didn't seem to be much interest in that kind of thing. Maybe the money wasn't there; maybe the principal of the middle school didn't believe in the concept - I don't know.
For whatever reason, there weren't any special classes beyond the fifth grade, and I was glad enough for that. Sixth grade was when you got a locker and a homeroom, and started moving around the building from class to class, rather than being taught all subjects in a single room by a single teacher; it was a very different experience, considered something of a rite of passage. It was tough enough just dealing with all the shuffling around the building and the fact that two-thirds of the grade were suddenly strangers (back then Millinocket had three grade schools that all fed into a single middle school).
As I said, though, the designation remained, tucked away in the infamous and secretive Permanent Records of those of us who had been in the Quest cadre back in elementary school, along with - we were routinely assured - evidence of every fight we'd ever been in, every time we had dared defy the will of a teacher, every visit to the principal's office, and the time I'd played a record backward1 while deejaying at the school radio station in the fourth grade. We were marked, and we were periodically reminded of it - and in the seventh grade a group of us were suddenly and strangely asked to do something entirely out of step with where we were in our school careers.
As part of a program operated by a center for gifted youth out of Johns Hopkins University, we were asked - ordered, really, I don't recall it ever being presented as optional - to take the SAT.
The SAT, the Scholastic Aptitude Test - a phrase to make high school juniors tremble, even more so now that they've made the test even longer, put in essay questions (the bane of test-takers and test-scorers alike), and taken out those great "GERMANY is to BELGIUM as WILT CHAMBERLAIN is to:" questions2. This was a test people in the impossibly distant eleventh grade had to take if they wanted to get into college, not something for seventh-graders to concern themselves with.
But concern myself with it I did. I had to. It was presented to me that if I bypassed this Unique Opportunity, I would be behaving in a deeply ungrateful fashion - that my parents hadn't slaved away for all those years so that I could decline any chance at a Better Life that might come my way. Understand, I grew up in an industrial town, but my parents weren't wage workers. Mom was a teacher and Dad an engineer, both college-educated, well-paid professionals. It wasn't a "you'll end up working at the tire factory like I do" sort of situation, but that was a bit what it felt like. My father has the unique ability to do things like that - sit at the kitchen table and imply with a straight face that classic "if you don't go to college, you'll end up like me" scenario, where in reality ending up like him would involve, among other things, a college degree. At any rate, it was put to me that if I didn't do this thing, I would regret it for the rest of my life.
As it happens, that was probably true, but not in the way my parents intended it.
Anyway, I took the test. It seemed to take forever and I was convinced when it was over that I had made a complete botch of it and would never be taken seriously in any academic context ever again. We heard nothing for months. Then a letter came, one day, congratulating me on my excellent scores and inviting me to participate in a variety of summer programs operated by the university in various places, including the main campus itself.
Those options were right out as far as I was concerned. I didn't know much about the outside world at the tender age of 12, but one thing I knew was that I had no interest in spending several weeks alone, in summer, in a place like Baltimore. In the 1980s, you would never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. David Simon would write Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets in Baltimore only a few years later. Johns Hopkins probably isn't in a bad part of town (though that's not a given - the College of the Holy Cross is in the absolute worst part of Worcester), but that wasn't a chance I was prepared to take at 12.
On the other hand, they did have an interesting-looking literature program running for a couple of weeks at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. That wasn't too far from home, only a couple of hours, and Bar Harbor certainly wasn't the sort of place where people got into knife fights in the streets (back then, anyway). I couldn't really be said to have had much interest in spending part of my precious summer vacation doing anything school-related, but I could at least be persuaded to go to the College of the Atlantic thing.
It was the first time I'd ever been away from home without my parents around, not counting several-day stays with my grandparents. I went into it, as I recall, with more resignation than excitement, taking it on more as a duty to make my parents and the Educational Authorities back home happy than any kind of personal adventure. It was a little like the mindset I expect people who are going to prison try to adopt: get in, don't draw attention from the really bad dudes, stay out of trouble, get out alive.
My mother was excited for both of us. "This is going to be a wonderful experience for you," she said. "You'll make friends and have a great time."
In Mom's defense, .333 is a pretty good batting average.
1 I hadn't - I had the 45-RPM single of Napoleon XIV's 1966 hit "They're Coming to Take Me Away" that had a backward recording of the song on the B-side - but I could never get Principal Sanders to believe that I hadn't tampered with the turntable. "Do you have any idea what those things cost? This is why schools won't have student radio stations soon." And he was quite right. Well, I'm not sure he was right about the why of it, but the one remaining grade school in town does not, in fact, have a student radio station now.
2 "20,000 WOMEN", supposedly.
