When I was in elementary school, we had the GT ("Gifted and Talented") program. They'd take us out of normal classes and we'd go to a room in the library and do various things like read books, make up stories, LOGO programming, illustrations, experiments, etc. It was probably about 15-20 of us.
I remember a few things clearly. First off, our teacher had an obsession with Chris Van Allsburg books - the author of things like Jumanji and The Polar Express. He had beautiful artwork and haunting writing. We even had a project where we took one of his books and finished the story (it was a compilation of a picture with one sentence describing part of it....mine was especially creepy, as it showed a room covered in wallpaper of doves, and one of them was peeling itself "off" the wallpaper and about to fly off, with the tagline "It all started when someone left the second floor window open.").
Edit: Ah ha! This is the book!
The Mysteries of harris Burdick
Edit 2: Holy shit. Here's the picture:
The only other thing I remember - and this went
down in history as one of the funniest things to ever happen, and
to this day if you ask any of the kids in that room, we all specifically remember this as our favorite GT moment - was when we were asked to describe our dreams and nightmares. One guy said he had a nightmare where Darth Vader flushed him down the toilet. We all erupted in laughter. I still remind the guy about it if I see him.
After a while, though, they decided GT was a terribly unfair program, so we were relegated back into normal classes with everyone else, except we had to do more homework. I still get angry about that once in a blue moon, as I loved the classes. We got extra time to work on amazingly fun things, and sometimes we just played computer games. I made a lot of friends in there as well, but quickly lost most of them once we ended the GT program. *sigh*
This is why I can't see myself being a teacher, as I don't want to deal with kids who don't care about their education. I'd
have to be given GT students, and to my knowledge, that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore (again, due to unfairness/un-PC issues).
On a completely different note, today is the last Thursday I'll ever spend in this house that my family has lived in for the last 26 years. It was kind of a sobering thought.
And still is.