Gifted and Talented

Remember everyone:  "can" has a short 'a' sound, while "can't" has a lifted 'a.'  Now, onward.

Let's return to elementary school.  It has been quite a while, hasn't it?  Let's see.  Currently, I am coming to the end of my sixteenth year of schooling, so elementary school as a whole was between eleven and fifteen years ago.  It sounds gruesome saying it, doesn't it?

In the first grade I took the fateful quiz/test/exam-thing that would determine THE REST OF MY LIFE.  Not really.  It was the test to see if I qualified as a gifted and talented (GT) student.  I remember questions like, "if you were an animal, which would you be?" and lots of analogy questions.  I just remember talking about tigers on my test.  Yes, yes, I was a natural born genius.  Everyone calm down. 

I never felt that different, being a gifted and talented student.  Until, once a week, my afternoon was not spent in the classroom with the other students.  I was, instead, taken with a group of about six other students to a bare, empty classroom where Mrs. Coleman basically let us play games and do puzzles all afternoon.  Math, logic, reading, spelling, all reduced (or elevated, as the teachers would tell you) to puzzles and play instead of tests and homework.  Oh, how I looked forward to 1:30 on Tuesdays, so I could leave the drab and dull lesson of the day to play games and eat candy and watch movies with the other smarties! 

The Gifted and Talented.

In the fifth grade (or fourth, I'm not sure), with the advent of Mrs. Whittington, it got real.  As it turned out, the former years were training for a brutal competition, a clash of the unharnessed power of young minds:  UIL.  The University Interscholastic League.  The arbiters of glory and shame.  The pressure of the UIL weighed down on us all, and the large frame* of Mrs. Whittington served as an ever present reminder of the watchful eyes of the UIL.

The year of training before the competition was grueling.  No longer were we greeted with candy and song.  Assessment after assessment were doled out to us.  Time limits, number two pencils, scratch paper.  The tools of the driver.  When the day of reckoning dawned, the six or seven of us left early in the morning on a full-length school bus to a different elementary school.  I don't even remember what subjects I took the tests for.  I only remember that I didn't win any recognition.  A young, malleable-minded Brittany, on the other hand, cried when she lost her competition.  Our Pegasus group (nice and pretentious, eh?) grudgingly returned to the bus, not a single award among us.  I was happy to have gotten out of school though.  After all, what else matters in the fifth grade?

However, with the pressure of the UIL bearing down, we had been granted several lovely breaks from school, in addition to our weekly adventures.  Because UIL competition was held on the day our elementary school was hosting a vaccination shot hand-out thing, our Pegasus group (it never gets old, does it?) took a half-day field trip to another school to receive our shots.  Basically, we got our shots in about fifteen minutes, then played on their playground toys for the rest of the day.

All of the gifted and talented students from all of the elementary schools were rewarded for their accomplishments (or effort, in our case) in the UIL competition with a trip to The Children's Museum, the holy grail of childhood adventures!  Look at me, while I shop for plastic fruits and vegetables!  Afterwards, we went for a picnic, where I happened to notice The Whittington's downcast look as she talked to her colleagues.

All told, we had four field trips that year that I remember.  Our half-day vaccination field trip, the Gifted and Talented trip to the Children's Museum, UIL competition, and the general fifth grade field trip to Hermann Park to see a live play production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  A shabby performance, even from the rough uncritical eye of this group of small-town ten-year-olds.  "With this jump rope, we'll create the magic Circle of Imagination!" and "We have to go through the wardrobe, Edward!" (Yes, I know his name is Edmund.)

I kept up my status as a gifted and talented student through middle school in all subjects except math.  That met an abrupt end in the seventh grade at the hand of Mrs. Garcia-Meitin.  I think I was left traumatized by the red ink that covered my assignments throughout that Algebra class.  It looked like blood.  The next year I played it safe in Mrs. "Big Bird" Christley's regular level math class.  Of course, I would get high A's throughout the year.  In my short stint as a regular level math student in the ninth grade, I learned that to stay at this level meant an intimate understanding of the drug and pregnancy scene with the rest of the students in the class.  I decided to reclaim my place with the other former Pegasi that had left me behind.  My low self-esteem in the area of math was reaffirmed in the subarctic climate of Mrs. Thibodaux's Pre-Calculus class my junior year.

After my first couple months at a private Catholic university, I quickly learned that being a gifted and talented Pegasus means nothing here.  I am a small fish, from a small pond, thrust into a savage ocean of philosophers, activists and intellectuals.  Better make friends with the sharks.




*In one of our fifth grade assemblies, we were visited by an artist, who created an entire creature from the outline of an egg, giving it suggested characteristics from the crowd.  It had a mohawk, muscular arms, and eyes like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.  When Kayla was fortuitously called on to name the beast, she named it after our taskmaster, "Mrs. Whittington."