Folly Gorge

Every child of the American public school system come to a point in their educational career when they are selected wither or not they are considered "gifted." For me, it apparently happened sometime during first grade, though nothing would really come of it for three years when I reached the fourth grade. From that point on, I was looked upon as slightly more clever than the majority of the children New Braunfels had to offer. The majority of the time, I was still in the regular classes and did not special treatment because of my "condition" as it was.

But by the time I was in eighth grade, it was ousted as being somewhat exceptional, though frankly I still have a bit of a hard time believing that I was smarter than most of the kids. Then again, looking back most of the students didn't even know where Argentina was on a map of South America, so it wasn't much competition wise. I was still in classes with the regular herd, but in some classes me, and the smarter kids were given different assignments from the lesser humans. This primarily happened in history, and science courses.

Anyhow, the assignments were usually just a variation of what the rest of the class did, only with a few more questions than normal. So, being smarter wasn't providing a much greater amount of work for the most part, but it did lead to some bullying, and being picked on. Emotional trauma aside, it wasn't particularly hard. Though on some occasions, we were given a completely different assignment from the rest of the class, making us feel even more separated than we already were.

The most notable occurrence of this was during in my United States history class, where those of us who were set aside were given a completely different assignment than the rest of the class. At that point in the school year we were studying the American Revolution (Brittan's whoopsy) and it's battles. The handful of us who were stupidly challenged, were assigned to write four pages on the events of Valley Forge.

For those who are uninformed, Valley Forge was a military encampment in Pennsylvania where the Colonial forces resided during the winter of 1777, during the war. Before this point in time, the public educational system did not let me know that his happened during the war. In my then eight years of education mainly told me that the events of the war was that we wrote the Decoration of Independence, then some years passed, then we won. They failed to let us know that thousands of soldiers froze to death, or severely suffered frostbite while waiting for the weather to lighten up.

After a month or so, the paper as due. I somehow filled out four or so pages, and turned it in, happy to have that thing over and done with. But, it was not two weeks later that we got the assignments back. I was given a fifty. Why you ask? Apparently it was meant to be a letter written from the point of view of a soldier with a solid black foot during the winter. The teacher never made this explicitly clear, but did not feel any sympathy for me, and did not give me a chance to fix the grade, what a rabble-rouser. Though after recieveing that grade, I would have likely given him something like this:



While not entirely educational, it was in letter form, so by his rules, I would have gotten a better grade.

As if this wasn't enough of an insult enough, I was enraged when I learned of what the other half of class did instead of a multipage research paper. Instead of taking weeks to write a paper, those muttonheads simply got to draw a picture depicting a battle between the colonials and the British. And despite how grossly inaccurate the picture may have been, they still received a 100, what a scandal. So, not only did I receive a bad grade, but kids who don't even understand how to use perspective in art received perfect scores for being able to scribble on a piece of printer paper.