Were you in the "Gifted Program" ?

I was and so was my son. It doesn't feel like anyone is watching us, but who knows. You pose some very interesting thoughts and ask some interesting questions.

reply to post by EDracon


So you don't remember any lymphatic, blood, neural network, or thyroid tests? No regular medication at an early age that mysteriously stopped after some thyroid tests? What about social connections? Do you remember any organizations that you were involved with which may have been a DoD front?

Originally posted by SymbolicLogic
reply to post by EDracon

 

So you don't remember any lymphatic, blood, neural network, or thyroid tests? No regular medication at an early age that mysteriously stopped after some thyroid tests? What about social connections? Do you remember any organizations that you were involved with which may have been a DoD front?

The only medication I was ever on was an asthma medication, but they did do some blood work.

reply to post by EDracon


Hm, I think asthma would preclude you from what I'm thinking of.

Do you remember what kind of blood work? What the test were for and what kind of machine was used? Did they just take a simple blood sample once in a great while, or, did they have you hooked up to this beast of a machine that took out your blood using a four-pronged (four needles) tubes and replaced it after the machine processed it?

^If it was for thyroid activity, was it for hyper, hypo, or a "reactive" metabolism? You could just read your old medical records for this. Unless there is no record.

Originally posted by SymbolicLogic
reply to post by EDracon

 

Hm, I think asthma would preclude you from what I'm thinking of.

Do you remember what kind of blood work? What the test were for and what kind of machine was used? Did they just take a simple blood sample once in a great while, or, did they have you hooked up to this beast of a machine that took out your blood using a four-pronged (four needles) tubes and replaced it after the machine processed it?

^If it was for thyroid activity, was it for hyper, hypo, or a "reactive" metabolism? You could just read your old medical records for this. Unless there is no record.

Honestly, I don't think I've had a thyroid test, and it wasn't a huge machine. They just took some blood, and sent the blood off to a lab. But it was soon after the gifted program test.

reply to post by EDracon


So after and not prior and during spaced at monthly intervals? Well, thanks for the clarification.

I was in the gifted program in school. They would take all of us out for special programs kids could do our own research, and more if we touched upon a more structured research area. I know from our program, and the years around us, most of us ended up in "alternative" news media and thinking. We all know things are different then they appear to the normal world.

reply to post by Roundtree

Was this an attempt to get the intelligent children on the books? find out who they are and watch them as they mature?

YES!

(second line)

Hey, one more thing I remembered about the program I was in...

did any of you have to wear halter monitors in PE? Because all of us wore halter monitors for heart activity.

Have any of your fellows in the program, or yourself, outran traffic on a diet that is deficient; representing what occurs in the field after an exceptional amount of time?

Originally posted by Whateva69
have anyof you guys heard of thisThe Golden Key International Honour Society

I just found out my brother in-law was told he should join.

love and harmony
Whateva

i'm in it....


the reason they would track smarter kids is obvious. if you're gonna lie to society you need to keep track of any kids who might be smart enough one day to figure out they've been lied to. hence they id them young and probably keep tabs on you. and so many of you end up here.... strange, huh?

reply to post by Roundtree thank heavens!I narrowly escaped the gifted program by 2 IQ points.I read this a week ago or so,therefore my reply to you is made before I read what has been added since.Thank you for making me get my 19th post.One more to go!

The intelligence quotient is poorly understood, don't sweat it...chill.

reply to post by InTheLight I agree.I'm chillin' Thank YOU for my 20th post!whee,Off to make a thread!

Originally posted by StealthyKat
Yes, I was in a group like this. I had to take some tests, and I remember having to look at pictures and tell a story about what was happening....also what I know know were ink blot tests. A lot of physchological tests. It was a small group. I hated it because it always felt weird to me. It's funny, but my memories are very vague. I can remember playing another game with blocks of different colors and I had to put them in a certain pattern etc...many of the tests were where I had to "guess what comes next" etc. It's kind of weird now that I think back on it. I had not thought of it until I saw this thread.

I recall these tests quite well actually. Being that my birthday is October 1st, about 2 weeks after the cutoff date for school year registration, the first series of tests I took deemed me able to start school earlier than normal. I was almost always the youngest kid in the class. In the beginning of my first grade year I was doing 3rd and 4th grade curriculum work. They asked my dad to move me up a grade and he wouldn't allow it due to the age gap then widening even more than it was.
In my area the program was also called TAG, Talented and Gifted. What I remember being so strange about it was how many times I was tested for it. While my kindergarten was in a Montessori school. I subsequently attended 5 different elementary schools in grades 1-5. They were all in the same school district yet I had to retake the dang test every single time. I remember even at that age being exasperated and asking why they couldn't just look at the prior tests, I wasn't getting stupider as obvious results were reflecting.
Another thing I remember distinctly about TAG was the book "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry." I had to read it three times in three separated schools. I wondered then how the program could vary as vastly to assign a book 2years after it had been previously assigned. LOL seems the leaders of TAG might not have been so gifted themselves... :/
I guess what stands out to me isn't so much any curriculum or extra activities due to being in TAG, but more all the extensive tests I took so many times. Once the school 'identified' me as potentially 'talented and gifted' I was then scheduled for tests (despite records showing that I had already complted them). Every time I passed their "test" and was "accepted", yet again, into the program. And after that I remember very few and far between actual acts of participation in anything other than what all the others were learning.
So basically I've always looked at my TAG experience as a bunch of redundant tests that seemingly had no real purpose due to the lack of further activity in any program. :\

Slightly odd how I came across this thread, was looking for a rabbit hole after reading the newest Sandy Hook "reports" (or whatever they should be called, contradictions, lack of reports, etc) and this notion of gifted and/or special children keeps nagging at the back of my mind. I can only speculate as to why this is nagging me, so in brainstorming about that I thought of the tv show Heroes, or the James Patterson book series about the children with extra special abilities... Just some background info on my train of thought in reading the thread

I didn't think so at first, but I came around after reading up on the Illuminati. These programs are used to screen potential candidates and also condition intelligent youths to their way of thinking. These programs didn't really exist until after Vietnam. I think it's the government trying to subvert our independence.

I was in Heights program and math Olympics and other advanced classes. I took and passed all high school proficencies in junior high when we could "test out". I also did national geographic bees and what not in school. I was smart but lacked common sense since there was none at home.

I don't know If there was an "agenda" it all seemed like they were trying to separate the smarter kids so the average and less than wouldn't hold us back by moving our education faster than the others. I felt like they were trying to create genuises rather than keep track of "smart kids" like if these kids can do this level of work this early then we need to nourish that.

I was in it, too, in the 70's. Three generations of gifted program in my family. My mom was in it early on, grew up in California but had frequent trips to Texas for no immediately discernible reason. Family has some footage of her and her sibling at SMU as children from a long, long time ago. The fact that I was in it made her nervous. She both hated it and loved it. Was kind of a weird dynamic to grow up with.

I've been looking into the programs for a while now. Many based their gifted student identification on Renzulli--iq and creativity plus some "other" quality. Games were big in them (from puzzles to logic grids to actual game manufacture) and I'm guessing were used to teach game theory (monstrous scaled cause and effect). Piaget's theories were also a popular choice for program development as well as Dabrowski's theories of positive disintegration. Someone said earlier on this thread that we were taught how to think and not what to think. I think that's very true based on what I've seen. I think that also may play a role in why not all of us went down the traditionally accepted paths. We probably have our own unique set of values in life and don't necessarily equate success with being equivalent to having a lot of money, status, or fame.

In the 60's and the 70's, it would seem that the creativity movement really got thoroughly embedded into the programs. Some seriously sketchy things were being discussed in that time period in the Gifted Child's Quarterly, particularly from Dr. Stanley Krippner. Even the president of the NAGC, John Curtis Gowan, had some pretty whacked out seeming ideas in regards to the gifted and he was involved with the NAGC until 1980, I believe. The Creativity Movement was kind of a spin off of the Psychedelic Movement. I kind of see it as the phd laden big word equivalency of it and definitely explained my anathema from all things New Age or Hippy, lol. It kind of back fired in my case, lol.

Memories of tests--both mental and physical--are probably going to be common amongst us. Identifying the physiological differences of the gifted seem to have been a keen interest over the last 100 years. If you do a search on google scholar, you can find loads of abstracts on a variety of research involving gifted students, including physiological testing (EEGs and more). In regards to it being a special education program, there is some truth to that, too. They were concerned about that fine line between genius and madness. I don't personally think that we are at a higher risk of mental illness than the more normative groups. It's just those times that we do break down that it has the potential of becoming a greater tragedy. That's just my opinion though.

Anyways, thought I would chime in and give some of the names of things that I identified in the gifted program that might interest others on this thread. If I can think of anything else that I found and forgot to mention, I'll toss it in. I'm not a former teacher or anything--just another former(?) gifted like a lot of you.

P.S. To the rabbit hole/Heroes woman--funny that you should say that about that tv show. There's been a whole lot of shows about gifted out there over the last couple years, many obviously amped up to make them more spectacular. I think a lot of them were probably inspired by the gifted programs (even Heroes) as it traces back to some of the whacky Creativity movement ideas.

reply to post by Roundtree


I was in a similar program in elementary school, and later in junior high. In about the 3rd grade or so, I got letters to go to something called a Magnet school, because teachers had already been taking me out of classes and into higher grade ones to learn with the other students. I got to be part of the chess club at a young age, until it was discontinued.

Later in middle school, about the second week of my fifth grade year, we had a teacher come around to all of the classes and call out a list of names. We were told that everybody's name she called would need to collect their things, and they would no longer be returning to our usual classrooms. I was one of the students called, and we were eventually led to a separate area of the school, and told that we would learn all of our subjects from here except for band and art. She started teaching us all the stuff I had to use my tenth and eleventh grade years, in like fifth, lol. Most of the student's in that class returned to her again for sixth grade. They were preparing us for something called the IB program in high school.

Unfortunately, the school this program was hosted at, had a bad reputation for students bringing guns to school, so they moved my sister and I to another county, before I was to reach my high school education level. The county and school we moved to didn't offer anything like this, and most of my papers never transferred over due to their negligence so I wound up taking a lot of classes over

reply to post by EDracon

I found that I generally already knew everything that was being taught, so I didn't feel compelled to do the work, and was utterly bored.

That is exactly what happened to me when the schools failed to transfer over my classes and credits. I kinda was annoyed with school at that point. Everything was completely boring and so completely easy to me.

About five years ago, when I was 15 there were some circumstances, in which the state was required to give me an IQ test, and they discovered that I was actually very intelligent for my age group. I was estimated to have an IQ of about 130 or so, which they told me was roughly a third year, or junior as some call it, in college. This didn't really come as a surprise to my parents because I was quite known for being on the Honor Roll, and Principle's List. I usually did phenomenal on my TCAP, which was like the end of the year assessment tests.