I have a number of interesting memories from my time at a ‘talented and gifted’ camp.
There was a personality profile test that they gave us. It was stupid. I know that whoever ran the camp thought they needed to measure stuff and thought that this was the way to do it, but that doesn’t change the basic fact.
My roommates and I, hardcore revolutionaries that we were, I mean, man, were we not moved to delay our destruction of the Old Order by another camp dweller who said she was going to study political science so that she could infiltrate the system and tear it down from the inside so give her 15 years to get something going (which time has expired, by the way, Jennifer!), and also she was a hottie, you would totally be waving our Little Blue Book in the air whenever a Peace and Conformance van was cruising your sector to document the myriad ways in which the Populi celebrate their beloved Master Triumvirate (of Which Steven is the Rockin’ Total Ruler, of Course), and Atari would still be the number one manufacturer of PCs and there would be no machine language before the 68k machine language, decided to game the system a bit.
One roomate used the random number generator on his calculator to get his answers. One just made pretty patterns on the bubble-sheet. My solution, which I now regard as inferior to theirs, was to just answer every sixth question or so.
I have noticed that the entire edifice of the quantification-obsessed educational system in the U.S. did not, indeed, come crumbling down since our display of raw, out-of-the-box intellectual power. I’m puzzled by that, but I suppose there will be other chances, like I can walk past a middle school at 3:15PM and tell some kid “You think your teachers are giving you ‘answers’, dude? When I was in school, they said ‘It’s called the Soviet Union, not Russia’, but now they’re telling you ‘There is no Soviet Union, but there is a Russia’, so why can’t they even get their propaganda straight”, and it’d blow his mind and, um, _then_ the entire edifice of the educational system would dissolve, I tells ya.
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