Were You Part Of The "Mentally Gifted Minds" Program In California Scools back in the 70's?

The excess wight in my backpack was always the books I wanted to read.

Nine different schools in three different states, before graduating high school. Always in gifted/talented programs, so much so that I had to take senior level and AP courses my junior year, after the final move.
The strange thing is that, living here in AZ from grade 3 to grade 5, I went to three different schools, all gifted/talented...And after talking to my mom about this recently, we could both name 2 of the schools, and she admitted to NOT KNOWING THE THIRD!!!

I could have gone off on the whole tangent of - I was a child, and you didn't know where I was all day???
Or, how can you not recall the name of your child's school?
I could have been subjected to anything at the time, and I've come to grips with that.
I can remember one of the schools having a highly irregular/artsy curriculum, not your reading/writing/arithmetic type thing...

All I can be thankful for is being a very well rounded individual, with a love of life-long learning.
When my grandfather on my forgetful mother's side passed away, it was made known that he had attained the 33rd degree, which is a completely separate freakout....

To not know the name of the school that I'd attended at the time, and for me to be so young and susceptible to pretty much anything then made me question whether my mom is my controller though...I'm just saying...But I mean, what are you really gonna do, at the end of the day?

Yeah, I went to a Montessori school, but all I know it as is "the Montessori school". I have no idea of the name. The only reason I've even been thinking about it is because it was a couple of miles away from where the school shooting occurred and I was trying to google map it to see exactly how far away.

On the military training thing..I went to camp for a few years on military bases and then did a couple of years at the camp that was the first US boys military camp (I'm a girl, but we're talking decades and decades after it was first opened). It is what it is. I'm tired of sugar coating it. Regardless of if it is unique or normalized, growing up under DoD funded programs and in a pick your alphabet agency house is NOT a healthy childhood. The culture is fucked.

Totally agree with the both of you. I've pretty much found out all I could on my end and what I found is hair raising and even more question stimulating. Again, though--at the end of the day, what is one gonna do? There's not a whole lot other than sitting here and calling potential foul. Maybe get a parent to think twice about what they are doing for fear that someday their kids could end up talking about it and finding solace in a place like this.

One thing that it has done though is that I have taken the gloves off entirely. I don't mask who I am anymore at all. I don't care how unsettled someone may get by my analysis of any situation or how much it may sting their soul. I am what I am. If I learned the tools that I did as a kid both at home and at school, then let me use them and be that brutal shock of reality that I think people need. It's the least that I can do to return the favor. (Hence why I consider myself a superbitch now, lol).

The amount of shills and idiots on this site never cease to amaze me.

So you were in JROTC? Okay.

Please, do go on.

(you expect us to believe that less than .02% of the nations population, some of the most gifted American minds, people that are so intelligent that even a crude bio-electrical test shows that they are anomalies, people that understand languages they've never learned, are all congregating on this site? I'm sorry, I could believe this if there were two or three. But most of you don't seem to have a clue.)

Yes, I was in GATE.

But, we learned how to dye leather and how to do some other artsy stuff. No big deal.

In high school, staff just took the extra pay, and did nothing for us. They said they would reserve the money to pay for CLEP tests.

Lame bastards.

I don't think anybody expects anyone on this thread to believe anything they say. We are supposed to be those most gifted American minds so we are very well equipped to weigh a huge variety of testimony and evidence to come to our own conclusions. Just because something was outside of your experience doesn't mean that it did not necessarily occur.

Look at it this way. You've been identified as one of the super bright children. Everyone who is around you that is aware of that fact is going to respond differently. If you have parents who tend to be selfish, they may abuse that fact in order to use you for their own purpose. If they are in some kind of agency, well, then that could change the dynamic for which you grow up in, too. My grandpa had his own personal set of goals for me and, in turn, he used home time to train me in different aspects of the military from classification systems to learning how to salute properly to being able to bounce a quarter off one's made bed (for the record, I leave mine messy--always the rebel). Identification of being one of these anomalous top minds may utterly change the dynamic for more than just school time. Think about how humans behave and tell me where that falls outside of the expected patterns of human behavior. All I have to do is think of examples like that horrible show, Toddlers and Tiaras, to see the truth of how a family can mess up a child's life because the child is extra dosed in a specific virtue.

And for the record, I was aware of this site but avoided it. This thread was the only thread that ever provoked me to respond. However, that people are accumulating to this thread isn't inexplicable when it does pop up on the search results. Is it all of us? Not even close. Identification was for the top 1-2% (not .02%). That would be about 6 million of us potentially out there at a maximum. Even your percentage (.02%)would number at around 60,000 and we represent less than 1% of even the lowest figure. 99% of the gifties are not here.

P.S. This is the primary reason why I did not have anything to do with this site previously. It's been my experience that you can't change the majority of minds or promote any form of rationality in either. Both are going to be entirely bought in to whatever flavor of reality they find most preferential.

^^ I hear that. Generally speaking though (regarding identification,) the only thing I have witnessed, in terms of adult (parent/teacher) roles, is that they expect the student to "teach themselves". Saying to the student, "just teach yourself", or having an adult say: "I'm not doing you any favors by doing you any favors," only makes for a bright, horrendously disadvantaged, and socially isolated individual. Honestly, we have studies that show how difficult "fitting-in" becomes for intelligent individuals; this kind of attitude just compounds the problem. Heck, once you identify a student as "gifted" how can you expect them to sit through a class which is... remedial? If the student does the work at their own pace, they'll be done reading the book the first week of class, not to mention the written assignments. No teacher is going to want to have to grade the assignments for a whole semester within the first few days of class. Is that student going to show up to class for lectures they already understand? Probably not. Is that student going to show up to class to watch some movie? Probably not. So what does the teacher do? They'll label the student as rebellious, say that they're cheating on the work, and fail them. In this situation, rather than being any type of advantage, intellect sucks. I'm not sure what you mean by being dosed in a "specific virtue," but I'll figure it out.

5 GATE students, school size = 500. 5/500 = .01... then you factor in the fact that there are other schools in the district and none of those other schools have GATE students/not all GATE students nesc. should be in the program... politics and fudging numbers and whatnot.

pretty much... getting people to acknowledge possibilities is a bitch, let alone facts.

I know this has been asked already but I would really like to know why op started this thread in the first place, have most of you already been part of this site or what were your reasons for coming to this thread?

Well, put something vague up on a conspiracy site... about a program that could be considered "elite" (or underfunded BS)and you're sure to get a bunch of traffic that becomes a self-perpetuating shit-storm.

In other words, there were already had to many threads about big-foot so someone decided to start this stellar piece of inquiry.

or, according to the other side, the aliens started it so they could data mine and study us

It's not really that hard to figure out.Rabbit hole my ass.As an old cop ounce told me"follow the money,follow the drugs."When you have a crime on your hands these are the places to look first.Media is the biggest drug right now.As for the money this rash of gun buying is making some people very rich.

I agree to an extent but the subject matters introduced may differ vastly as well as expectations dependent on each individual child and their environment. The books I had available to read at my grandfather's home were books on profiling, including handwriting analysis and "reading" behaviors, and numerology. He was extremely high ranking in the military so my experience is going to be a whole lot different from someone whose family isn't so thoroughly embedded in the military. There's a book called "Military Brats: Legacies of childhood inside the fortress" that apparently really outlines those differences for military children and non-military. The awareness that some children's lives are vastly different is why I have been fairly consistent in pointing out those differences between gifted and gifted military family. Although I too was left to sink or swim a lot, my at-home education was very keenly directed and different from yours. I also had to learn about guns, archery, and hand to hand combat. Did you?

One issue with taking just one's own program group is that that may not have been the only group within the school. According to my middle school yearbooks, there was a 7th grade TAG teacher and an 8th grade TAG teacher. Kind of implies that each grade (at least in my district) may have had their own group of gifted. Also, according to Terman and others, some areas had a higher frequency of gifted children than others (ie California was cited as having the highest number of gifted). I agree overall though--the 1-2% figure presented by Congress was for the most intelligent in the US. However, one can read over and over again that there were some other X factors that they were looking for within that group. Because of that, it's probably much lower since it's not solely based on IQ.

Number junkies ftw! lol Good to see another number junky. :)

Oh and totally forgot--that was precisely my son's issue in school. Given a book, he'd polish it off by the week's end...then he'd have to remember to write out his section summaries over the course of a month. He'd forget to do that, of course, and wasn't a fan of doing them all at once either since that wasn't the expectation. Probably the best class that I ever had was a biology class in college that was "do at your own pace". I held the record for finishing the class at the earliest date with the highest marks (100%--no kidding). It's what earned me recommendations to Berkeley. Honestly, I think that the "do at your own pace" would be really the best thing for schools overall. It'd free up the teacher's time to be there for questions and spread homework turn in over an entire semester instead of having X paper written by 28 students due on X date to be graded by the next couple days.

My story of how I ended up here is rather humorous. My fiance and I were out to dinner one night after I had caught myself doing some rather underhanded manipulations to a political movement. He was asking me to explain the differing agencies and so there I was, drawing away on a napkin to show him the various relationships. On the subject of the NSA, I told him that the NSA was the agency that offered internships to the gifted. On a flight of fancy (I'm a writer so I think of books I'll never write all the time lol), I told him that that would be a hysterical idea for a fiction book--that the gifted were somehow sleeper agents for some alphabet agency, lol. We were so tickled by the idea that when we got back home, we started poking around to see if there was anything about this program that I barely recollected (write what you know!). I stumbled upon this thread in that search and my heart sunk when I began reading the reports of amnesia.

That said, at the end of the day, I do not think we are any form of sleeper agents as my flight of fancy for a fiction book suggested. I do think the prevalence of amnesia within this group is most likely related to the usage of hypnosis as evidenced by Krippner, Gowan, et al. Amnesia reports decline sharply for the more recent gifted and that matches the use time period (60's through 80's). The goal was probably to simply make us beneficial to society--not mind controlled assassins. But that's just my opinion.

Well, it seems more accurate to state that there is a major interest in finding out more about: personality traits that indicate intelligence, demographics of relative development, symptoms in child/adolescent schizophrenia, social integration, intellect and family relations, psychosis and family relations, etc.

The program is a bit underfunded to be making psychic sleeper super agents that are genetically modified by aliens.

But in terms of developing a greater understanding of certain factors, it seems to be doing the job. When the academics aren't making the numbers mean what they want them to mean.

Get out the tin-foil! Avoid the bmicrowaves.

Tbqh, saying the NSA is the agency that "offers internships to the gifted," is a little bit confusing/misleading. First off, doesn't each state has different "gifted" programs, esp. when you break it down by each school?

Not every program is the same, and it'd make sense for the demographics/population base to effect what is/was being studied. Then, there is the fact, that the other agencies such as the FIB/CIA/whatever also offer internships, right? The thing is, they require factors that often have nothing to do with the goals/outcomes of the compartmentalized local programs. So they don't really have any interest in recruiting from the rabble-babble group of randomness do they? Saying "you must have x gpa." doesn't really mean much when you consider that most of the programs: a.) didn't require a gpa for entrance, b.) were underfunded and therefore either-- crap... or... "focused" (specialized?)... no matter which way you cut it, most interns, for any soup kitchen program, would either be from the general population of the school(s) or from a population that had a higher chance of being involved with such things, e.g. stable family, stable/high earnings, ethnically homogeneous (social integration,) IQ high to above average-but not to the extent that it'd cause issues with anything, politically aligned with staff/students, etc. etc. etc... If it was spelled out... any more than this... I'd run out of letters.

If you wan't to put on some MORE tin-foil on top of the tinfoil, you could say that might mean areas that are remote and sparsely populated are more likely to have sensitive/fringe topics being researched/analyzed & densely populated areas that are inter-connected would be more likely to have universal topics/focuses of study.

At any rate, you'd have to go through hundreds of pages of thesis/dissertation B.S. from your local, state, etc. areas to figure out just the basic levels of what was going on. If you notice correlations, you'll know I'm probably (not?) pulling your leg. But hey, take it with a grain of salt.

P.S. Don't know why that file popped up when I was typing this There are Bugs in the Network... maybe my computer isn't Operating quite right....

p.s.s.p.s.p.s. The thought that the NSA is taking in underage students scares the shit out of me. The thought that the NSA is taking in *18-20 something something year old* ivory-tower-academic-adults scares the shit out of me even more... so I'm going to chuck all of this out, and believe that the only reason they claim to have internships is because it is required by law.

I followed the money and read close to 1000 abstracts and research papers on the subject. Although the gifted program is under-funded on a federal level, that does not mean that there was not private funding offered to the programs, which can be traced (as I've already done on this thread). Some pretty big names get tied back into it.

Also, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater on the NSA aspect: [link to www.nsa.gov]

You can be dismissive as you like but the fact remains that the NSA does have summer internships to Gifted and Talented seniors. CIA doesn't readily pop up with the same interest in the program (notably, there is a CIA = Creative Intelligence Agency which is not Central Intel to muddy that search up)...nor is there a similar application for the FBI in regards to the gifted and any sort of summer program.

Aspects of the gifted programs across the US are mandated by law, including who is going to be involved with them (psychologists) and the basic intentions behind the programs/what they are to be about (STEM type subjects). Although each state has control over the administration of their gifted programs, they still must follow some guidelines and tend to accumulate their thinking through things like the NAGC. Additionally, the poor funding also makes it feasible for very large corporations to have some influence as well as more localized interested parties. If you actually look at the variety of things that people post, the subject matters and things recollected only differ really over time--not by locale.

You know, your own behavior actually really bothers me on key points. I, at least, provided direction, links and more to back up what I was finding in regards to the gifted program. I'm not seeing that from you. What I'm seeing is someone who wants to affiliate questioning the gifted programs as being tin foil hat material and if you're going to state something as fact, at least have the common decency to back it up with evidence. Don't be so damned disrespectful of some very smart people.

I don't want to post specific evidence for a very good reason.

Yes- I was, in the 1960's, California. I remained in the program from 2nd grade until grade 12. Curious as to why you are asking-? We were regularly tested, asked to draw pictures, answer obtuse questions, and were rather isolated from the student body mainstream.

Yes because posting a linking to a public website is so very dangerous.

Minds might explode!


I'm still trying to figure out how to present my stack of info without including the most doctored birth certificate known to man (among other things). It may be bogus but it's been mine my whole life so it's still personal.

Just wanted to note that the presentation is for a different project, not to post in this thread lol. It's as long as the thread by itself.

I've presented one of my pieces of wth? already but without a whole lot of information tied with it elsewhere. I totally understand feeling the need for disclosure. I'm still brewing on how I'm going to do that one.

What a dillema.Each of us holds so many peices to this strangeness.

Thats rich.

And by the way.12/21/12 has been VERY interesting so far.

Yep. Worse yet, it's next to impossible to say that those things that should raise alarm bells in anyone had anything to do with this or were simply a "personal problem". It's a wretched mess. Then again, if something was significantly amiss, then they wouldn't make it easy at all. If there is one thing that I would lay a charge against the program for is the lack of full transparency. Finding out what happened with us shouldn't be impossible (unless you're within that 5 year mark) and most of what I could find was less curriculum (rare) and more research results and theories. Bunch of assholes. They were working with kids in a specialized program. FULL transparency should be mandated.

My concerns about that date, btw, was more social effects than any sort of end of the world. The latter is mostly due to my aforementioned associations with the daddies of the 2012 theme, which I will regret til the end of my own days.

I don't want to give specific examples because I've realized that not everyone on/reading this thread is mentally stable; I don't want to cause a psychotic episode... sorry for making any assumptions.

I flat out just don't know of specific examples for other states, so there is little point in me doing the leg work when you could do it for yourselves. If people were to look into local programs and build a database, that'd be different... and extremely useless and boring??? Anyhow, I don't see anyone doing that, and my thread for such things is fairly dead; I think it is safe to assume that this is a sign.

At any rate, there are a BUNCH of black helicopters flying around right now, like, every other hour. And I'd really rather not say something that could be taken the wrong way/piss someone off, and wind up in wallawalla.

As far as I know, the statement that they've stopped keeping track of students is misinformation; I recall signing a contract that they were allowed to... for a period of 10 years or so with possible extensions. You can bet that a bunch of other people signed the same contract not understanding what it meant at the time. I don't know if that was very common though, nor do I regret signing it.

Don't take me too seriously.

Whatever, this thread is nearly 300 pages of cyclical logic, fear mongering, creative writing, fuzzy childhood memories, and bits of the truth sprinkled in.