Tuesday, July 15, 2003
Missing Persons, Part Deux
I'm skipping kindergarten because I don't remember any specific people that are Missing from my life. So onto elementary school!
This one goes out to my entire elementary school class. I had a bit of a strange situation. I went to, I guess, a good sized elementary school, but I stuck with the pretty much the same class for all five years. This is because I was in the school district's Smart Kids program, also called the Challenge program. It was also a program for people with learning disabilities, which helped my ADD go unnoticed for several years. I remember a little bit of the test to get into the class. There were, like, 10 pictures of a hose. And you had to draw things that were coming out of the hose. I'm guessing that that was the "creativity" part of the test.
So anyway, I was with the same 20-30 smart/weird kids for my elementary school career. And we did some good things. Our class had a suggestion for a school-wide recycling program. It got implemented. I think it eventually turned into a neighborhood-wide recycling program. Some brilliant girls turned the school's theme song, "Truman Pride" into "Truman Died," which was about the idiot who stayed on Mount St. Helens when it erupted. Some of the same later attempted to rig the school-wide spelling bee, and succeeded, but then felt guilty about it and turned themselves in. Fantastic stuff.
Things started turning sour, though, when junior high came around. The Smart Kids class got broken up and turned into just two of the seven classes of the day. More importantly, the social pressures of junior high (Hell on Earth) shattered most any connection I had to these people. At that point, my family decided to move. I could guess that, when high school came around, a lot of those aquaintances and so forth might have turned into friends. Once the idiot ladder of junior high social life was removed, or at least mitigated slightly, things probably would have changed. I don't mope about that, really. It just came to me as I was writing this. This probably connects very easily to my whole roots complaint. I had some sort of social roots once, but lost them, and never figured out how to replace them.
I sometimes wonder if there's any decent way to find out what happened to these people. I know what happened to one of them. There was a girl who was there for one year. In the class photos, that year is the only one that I wasn't the tallest (I think). Because she was. She went on to become a college basketball star. See? I told you this group of kids was pretty special, though I didn't necessarily expect it to be in atheletics. But I can and will argue that atheletic intelligence is not something to be scoffed at.
I'm skipping kindergarten because I don't remember any specific people that are Missing from my life. So onto elementary school!
This one goes out to my entire elementary school class. I had a bit of a strange situation. I went to, I guess, a good sized elementary school, but I stuck with the pretty much the same class for all five years. This is because I was in the school district's Smart Kids program, also called the Challenge program. It was also a program for people with learning disabilities, which helped my ADD go unnoticed for several years. I remember a little bit of the test to get into the class. There were, like, 10 pictures of a hose. And you had to draw things that were coming out of the hose. I'm guessing that that was the "creativity" part of the test.
So anyway, I was with the same 20-30 smart/weird kids for my elementary school career. And we did some good things. Our class had a suggestion for a school-wide recycling program. It got implemented. I think it eventually turned into a neighborhood-wide recycling program. Some brilliant girls turned the school's theme song, "Truman Pride" into "Truman Died," which was about the idiot who stayed on Mount St. Helens when it erupted. Some of the same later attempted to rig the school-wide spelling bee, and succeeded, but then felt guilty about it and turned themselves in. Fantastic stuff.
Things started turning sour, though, when junior high came around. The Smart Kids class got broken up and turned into just two of the seven classes of the day. More importantly, the social pressures of junior high (Hell on Earth) shattered most any connection I had to these people. At that point, my family decided to move. I could guess that, when high school came around, a lot of those aquaintances and so forth might have turned into friends. Once the idiot ladder of junior high social life was removed, or at least mitigated slightly, things probably would have changed. I don't mope about that, really. It just came to me as I was writing this. This probably connects very easily to my whole roots complaint. I had some sort of social roots once, but lost them, and never figured out how to replace them.
I sometimes wonder if there's any decent way to find out what happened to these people. I know what happened to one of them. There was a girl who was there for one year. In the class photos, that year is the only one that I wasn't the tallest (I think). Because she was. She went on to become a college basketball star. See? I told you this group of kids was pretty special, though I didn't necessarily expect it to be in atheletics. But I can and will argue that atheletic intelligence is not something to be scoffed at.