TAG

Due to the incredible volume of work that is coming at me and the also incredible volume of projects/reading/discussions that are due at school, plus being a wife and mother, and running a support group for parents of disabled children, and homeschooling a teenage boy in math and history, I probably won't be posting on this blog as often for the next few months.  Please forgive me.  Oh wait, I don't care.  Seriously, I need to breathe.

It's actually been a huge blessing to be able to work with my son on those subjects I just mentioned, because he chose the middle ages to learn about, and I love that time period. When I was in the 6th grade, I got put into something at school called "TAG".  It stood for "Talented and Gifted" and it was the equivalent of painting a target on your back for all the other kids to aim at who didn't get to go to TAG.  Being in TAG meant that once a week, you left your normal class and got bused over to a building on another campus, where a teacher would work with you and teach you things that the other kids didn't get to learn.  We were so lucky.  We had this teacher named Mrs. McKey, and she decided that for that semester we would be studying the Middle Ages. So, she read to us from Ivanhoe. We studied castles.  We learned about knights. We learned all kinds of stuff.  In between times we were given ridiculous, problematic situations to solve and we had to team up with other kids in the class to figure out the solution to these problems.  We also got to play a lot of board games, like chess and Pente, and other stuff that was intended to bend your brain into unreasonable shapes. The biggest thing we did was choosing a project that involved a lot of research...a LOT of research...and we had to work on it for the entire semester and then present it at the TAG medieval fair.  So, I wrote a book.

I always wanted to be a writer.  So, this book, it had a lot of stuff in it about the time period, but it was also very girly...a princess falls in love with a stable boy who gets drafted into her father's war, so she disguises herself as a knight and goes off to fight in said war, much to the chagrin of her father, who finds out after the fact.  I killed off the stable boy.  Yeah, I know.  Heartless. And yes, it was sort of Mulan-esque, but I didn't know about Mulan then, and the movie was still just a twinkle in Disney's eye.

The thing about being in TAG was that once you were in it, you were in it.  So when we got to middle school (6th grade was in elementary then), you were put in TAG and you were with the same people in those classes until you graduated.  We had a lot of opportunities that other kids at the school didn't have, and later I thought that this was probably a bad thing..because some of those kids probably could have been in our class and done just fine..but they didn't have the opportunity.  After a while we became like this weird family: people who were thrown together who normally wouldn't have hung out with each other at all, but we were in these classes, and we learned to tolerate each other just because we all had the same "classification".  Now, when I talk about it, it sounds like some weird social experiment.  Perhaps it was.  No one really harassed me about it at school, but I know that some of my classmates were.  "Does your mother dress you?" etc.  That sort of thing.  Ridiculous.

So, anyway, I'm not sure how I got on this subject.  What I do know is that being passionately, avidly curious, has kept me from feeling depressed many, many times, has probably kept me from feeling "olde"  (it's a four-letter word to me, so I have to add the "e"!) , and helped me instill that in my kids.

Back to the original subject:  I will still be posting on this blog, but probably not as much, just because there are other things that really need my attention right now.

Now, the day is getting Olde, and I have to go and explain radioactive decay and half-lives to my daughter.  A goode tyme will be had by all.