GATE and similar programs all start at the 3rd grade post testing (Naglieri) and continue on to 7th or 8th grade with differential learning and pull out. After that, the program becomes a lot less obvious. Like I said elsewhere on this thread, I didn't know that I was technically taking gifted classes all the way through my senior year until just this last year. These were considered to be optional but honestly, I remember thinking that those sounded far more cool than the normal ones. They were definitely my favorite classes in high school so not much of an option, lol.

It's interesting that you remember differences in education early on, too, though before the formal start of the programs. The education that I was getting when I was 5 was very different from your typical kindergarten. Did find out a new fun fact from my dad in regards to that time period and that was that I was actually living with my grandparents at the time. Odds are that my peculiar "kindergarten" experience was probably a DoD school that I was going to if what he says is true. It's quite likely that, as you were growing up in a heavy military town and that members of the base would have their children going to schools there, the DoD probably had more involvement in your school than say a school in a town that had no adjacent base. Get what I'm saying? DoD schools are supposedly some of the best in the nation, at least according to the few sources that I looked at.

I wasn't shoulder tapped by any military recruiters either. My grandfather was the sole source of the military push to make that absolutely clear again. The "general" theme and fast tracking came directly from him and I believe it was the same for drfalken007. Same story line/offers via a family member in the military. I always just figured that the military and other agencies probably didn't want anything to do with me because it had already been long noted that I had "issues with authority", lol (if you consider issues with authority being questioning authority).

In regards to When Worlds Collide, it's funny but I wrote something with that exact title about a year ago. The subject matter had nothing to do with the actual book though. I read the synopsis on the wiki and it sounds familiar. Definitely sounds like an attempt to apply ethics/philosophical thinking. The book sounds like the whole lifeboat case, which is a major ethics argument in Western Philosophy. If that is the case, then it is a pretty odd thing for a young kid to read both for the doom and the exposure to this concept. Grim really but not unfamiliar to me either.

Skittles--interesting that your pseudo-mom told you to avoid the flashing lights. To attempt to describe what I have felt when exposed to them, the closest thing would be that I feel like my mind has been put into a blender, extreme anxiety, and eventual dissolution. It's like a loss of utter control but not a seizure. My fiance has witnessed this effect on me long before we came across this thread and he said that the look in my eyes is absolute terror with no hope of escape, like I'm trapped in a small dark box with no hope of escaping. Lovely, eh? This Halloween is going to be interesting for me indeed. I'd simply send my daughter out with my son to monitor her trick or treating but part of me is curious to see if it does provoke a full flashback this time around. How's that for desperation? lol