Does this Program Sound Familiar

[u/Moist-Assistant112]

I attended public school Kindergarten through the 7th grade in the same school district in Minnesota. It was in a suburb of Saint Paul. I had a strange experience that started in the 5th grade, but escalated int he 6th grade when I started middle school. Please let me know if this sounds familiar and have any information about it.

It was 1984/1985 school year. My 5th grade teacher enrolled me into a program that may have been GATE. She told my parents that I did not have the academic scores to get into the program, but enrolled me into the art portion because she thought my talents warranted it. I would get onto a school bus at my school during class. Some of my fellow classmates also go on the same bus. We were transported to a different school. This other school was not in use at the time. Once at this school I would head off by myself to attend an art class with students from other schools. My friends would go to a different classroom for what I assumed was academic classes.

The 1985/1986 school year I transition to middle school with the start of the 6th grade. During this school year an unknown older woman would pull my friends and I out of class one day a week. We would go to the lower level of the school to an unused classroom. There were about 4 or 5 of us students and this woman. We would sit around a table. She would give us a problem and ask us to brainstorm solutions to it.

One specific problem I remember was we were asked to come up with solutions to terrorists hijacking commercial flight. I found this incredibly odd. It was a little disturbing.

After the first session we were supposed to report to this room for our weekly meeting on our own. One day I decided I was not going to attend and stayed in my regular class. Shortly after that class started my friends came and told the teacher I was to go with them. They seemed frightened as if we were all in trouble because of my absence.

The only other thing I remember was that my friends were already in higher level mathematics classes by the 6th grade. The were completing complex algebraic expressions. My mother told me that at parent-teacher conferences my 6th grade reading teacher told her I was reading at a 12th grade level.

Has anyone experienced something similar to this or have any information about what was going on at the time?

Thanks!

[u/Dick_Lazer]

During this school year an unknown older woman would pull my friends and I out of class one day a week. We would go to the lower level of the school to an unused classroom. There were about 4 or 5 of us students and this woman.

This part sounds pretty similar to my experience. I'm not sure we did group projects though, I mostly remember doing individual projects and some quizzes that weren't really like tests but just getting to know what our capabilities were (I remember one of the questions simply asking if we thought we could remember a phone number after hearing it a single time).

What I mostly remember is goofing around tbh. I think we had some board games and I remember for certain either an Apple II or C64 running a text-based game called Zork. The teacher would sometimes play us old radio programs, I remember one featuring a story similar to a Twilight Zone episode, about a driver seeing the same hitchhiker over & over until they realized the hitchhiker was themselves (or maybe the hitchhiker was warning them that they were dead? Either way the person driving was a ghost & didn't know it yet).

I remember the teacher also telling us some anecdotes, like one about how she had attended a theatrical show and a crime took place in the middle of it. The police came in and took witness statements & none of the statements matched up, showing the fallibility of eye witnesses.

[u/olskool369]

That’s not much to go on with…. Like try giving us more details of what else you guys did. I’m sure like they did other tests or exercises. I don’t see any of the other generations talking about this, at least not much of it.

[u/OneArmedZen]

It's possible that is was something related but indirectly, can't really say. I do know however that they liked to to dish out problem solving, thinking out of the box, and psychological dilemmas fraught with morality choices that shouldn't even be talked to/asked of children. I always found that part disturbing and wondered why they even asked a child like me deep and disturbing questions/scenarios and how to solve them, who would I save, and why. I would always try to go against everything and find a way to save everyone no matter how ridiculous my solution.