Oh man. Sadly you've touched a little class-based nerve for me. I never went to a sleepaway camp. Day camps (usually parks n' rec arts camps or something), sure, but growing up in Arizona, those fancy East Coast sleepaway camps were strictly the domain of my wealthier classmates. I was always pretty envious.
Now that I've typed this though, it occurs to me there must be sleepaway camps on the West Coast. Or are there? All the girls I knew when I was 12 who got to go away to camp went East -- but perhaps it's because they had family ties to that part of the country? I couldn't say.
I never had any interest in overnight camp. I went to day camp when I was little, and that was campy enough for me: we rode horses and made lanyards and all that crap.
Most of my friends in high school had gone to a YMCA camp, and my sister went to a music camp for several years, but I wasn't interested in either of those. My parents tried halfheartedly to get me to go to Jewish camp a couple of times, but they were all really far away (mostly in California) and I thought it was insane to go all that way.
(So yes, Sommer, there are sleepaway camps on the West Coast.)
I never went to sleepaway camp, and during day camp, which was held in the park two miles from the house, it always rained. Like a rain dance, it was, girls singing around an old tree.
Sommer, I feel you. I was actually having some pangs of class-based angst when I wrote this and rewrote a few lines of the post based on it.
The sleepover camps I went to in sixth grade were in the Midwest close to where I lived and were run by the Boy/Girl Scouts and the YMCA (I wasn't a member of either, but I was happy to use them for their camps). They were pretty middle class and definitely not one of the fancy camps that some of my friends from school went to (but it was camp-camp and not day camp so I didn't care). I do realize that even the experience of going to one of the "discount" camps is one that many families can't afford, which is too bad because I think it's such a great experience for kids.
The camp I worked with in high school was actually a special program for at-risk youth and most of the kids had heavily (or completely) subsidized tuition. They were a really great group of kids and, cheesy as it is, it was probably the biggest difference I've ever made in someone's life. (I still get a letter or email from ex-campers every now and then saying thanks.) Working there definitely highlighted the class-based barriers a lot of kids have to camp because you saw how much they got out of it and couldn't help but wish more kids in similar situations could have that experience.
Oh! And I was always the counselor they put in charge of icebreakers and get-to-know-you games and all of those stupid cheers and chants they used to quiet the kids down.
I expect it's because I have a big mouth and no shame.
I also expect this is not a surprising revelation.
I was saddened to find out that Senator Jefferson Smith's summer camp was really a front for an elaborate operation to steal nickels and pennies from the children of America. Fortunately, Congress acted to restore honor and dignity to the Senate by voting for his expulsion.
You know, I don't think I ever realized as a kid that camp was a rich-kid thing. The camps my sister and my friends went to were pretty cheap; the Jewish camps were more expensive, and I later met a lot of people who went to them, many of whom were rich, spoiled kids from California, but it didn't occur to me to connect the two until much later. I didn't know anyone who went to very fancy camps.
I never had any camp experience (well, except for Seeds of Peace when I was 13), until I was a camp counselor in college, for—yeah, wait for it—Math camp.
Yes, I am a giant dork. But yeah, it was unbelievably fun, and I made some of my best friends there.
But I have a lot of class-based camp anxiety, too. In 7th grade, me and a bunch of other kids took the SAT (I forget what the program was called.. talent search or some crap) and I scored high enough to go to the CTY thing at Johns Hopkins and I wanted to so badly, and it was like thousands of dollars. So, no.
Same thing happened in high schol with the Berklee (college of music) summer program, which I busted my ass trying to get in and get a scholarship for, and then they offered me—$500. The program tuition was $3500. Fuckers.
In 7th grade, me and a bunch of other kids took the SAT (I forget what the program was called.. talent search or some crap) and I scored high enough to go to the CTY thing at Johns Hopkins and I wanted to so badly, and it was like thousands of dollars. So, no.
I scored high enough for that, too! But it was $3000, so I couldn't go.
Math camp was awesome because all the other counselors were way smarter than me, kids with 1600 SAT scores at MIT and Caltech and stuff. All the other counselors were people who had done the math camp when they were in high school, and worked their way up. The camp was a summer-long number theory course, which meant being a counselor involved sitting with them in "study group" and prodding them along on doing proofs, grading their work, etc. So rad. I manage to get in on it because I took a number theory course with the professor who ran the camp and he liked my work enough to hire me even though I'd never done the camp before.
I never got the class-based thing with camp. The ones I went to were Boy Scout camps, which were pretty inexpensive and very "rustic". No fancy-dancy cabins or dining halls for us, we slept in canvas tents and cooked our own meals.
I spent one summer working at a Boy Scout camp when I was 15, it was honestly the best job I ever had despite (or perhaps because of) still using the canvas tents even as counselors. And I figured out my actual pay rate once, conservatively based upon 6 12-hour work days per week, and it ended up being something like $.30/hour, but damn if those were the only paychecks I've ever felt I really earned. Looking back now, I realize that they gave me a shocking amount of responsibility for someone my age (I was effectively an area director), but at the time I just did the job and didn't think about that.
I most miss teaching my wilderness survival classes. Those were hella awesome.
Yeah, my middle school guidance counselor rounded up a group of about twenty-thirty "smart" kids to take the SAT. I think only two of us qualified. The other one was this guy, who I then went on to "date" in the eighth grade. Ah, good times.
16: Yeah, I'm not embarrassed to admit that I was fascinated by the SAT at age 10 (when my older sister was taking it and there were books around the house) and would do problems for fun.
Oh yeah, I did that CTY thing. I think my grandparents sprung for it, I remember it being not particularly cheap. Mine was up at Vassar, I really enjoyed it. Living in a college dorm for three weeks when you're in middle school is pretty sweet. We certainly dorked it up--free time was split between Magic: The Gathering and learning how to really play chess with some kids who were pretty good. It was also the first time I had ever asked a girl out, to the dance at the end of the session.
My middle school decided to stop teaching algebra to 8th graders in favor of a restructured high school curriculum that would cover it later (and supposedly faster). I think just about everyone in that school took almost exactly the same classes. I suppose that's not a bad way to run things, but it wasn't a whole lot of fun academically.
I've done math stuff for fun in the past, but have never liked standardized testing.
I used to love standardized tests, too. I was always really good at them. I used to look forward to the Iowa Test week because it was almost...relaxing. They always just seemed like a puzzle to me and not anything stressful. I'd go into the same zone that people must when they do crossword puzzles or play sudoku.
I went to a sleepaway camp for five years. Man, it was great. It even had its own school so we stayed there through Fall, Winter, And Spring. OK, they called it an orphanage or more formally a "Child Care Center" but I couldn't be fooled. We had counselors AND nuns and rarely saw our parents.
We even went—in shifts of a few weeks—to a place on Cape Cod each summer. It was the life I tell ya.
I never went to sleep-away camp, either. I did do the parks 'n rec type-thing, as a kid, and I had a pretty good time with that, actually. It never occured to me that it was normal for people to go elsewhere and stay somewhere for camp; I'm not even sure I knew you could do that.
All I really remember about camp is swimming, running for the Kool-Aid ("bug juice"), and having a huge crush on one of the female counselors because she was nice to me a couple of times. Gawd, I was easy then.
I found it disturbing to realize that I was actually happy that the section I got twice on the GRE was the analytical. I can't believe that's an essay section now.
29: Oh, that makes me very mad! I spent an entire summer working at an organization whose whole premise was that all kids should basically be learning algebra in 5th or 6th grade, that waiting until high school is all wrong. It's kind of like a little religion for me, that notion.
One nice option about going to a K-12 school is that it was really easy for them to send me over to the high school for math and French classes, and other people for English, or whatever. Although when I got to high school they did away with the "honors English" course and just had everyone in the same classes.
Also, I can't comprehend my brother's problems with the SAT/ACT/AP tests. I just don't get how he can't get it since those tests always came so naturally to me. I can't even relate. I suppose it's like him not being able to understand why I can't throw a curveball or whatever.
I've heard it's basically just whether you can take a stand on an issue and defend it, and if you can, they give you a high score. Sounds totally worthless to me.
(Bear in mind that this is like third-hand information.)
42: They shouldn't have much trouble interpreting the scores--it's just replacing the SAT II Writing test, which no longer exists. And it's easy in the sense that you don't have to be particularly creative, but you do need to be able to structure an argument and distinguish assertions from evidence, and so on.
I did poorly on the no essay "Achievement" test that the SAT II: Writing test replaced. I took the SAT II: Writing when it came out a year later and suddenly I didn't have to take the "get out of remedial English" test that my college would have made me take based on the earlier score.
Not entirely. They're not grading on the merits of the argument, true, but that's the territory of the other subject tests. It tests whether you can organize your writing coherantly, content aside, which is a worthwhile skill.
I am still annoyed that the SAT II: Writing couldn't get me out of freshman comp courses. I had to pay to take a departmental test that was like "write 300 words on the mood or theme of this poem." 300 words? Seriously? That's your test?
Actually, I'm bitter about class-exemption in general. I did the International Baccalaureate Diploma, which didn't end up getting me shit in the way of college credit, except for in foreign language, the one things that I wanted to take anyway.
West coast 4-H camp was fun and it must've been cheap, b/c my sister and I both went a couple times. I had no idea until college that camp was some class issue on the east coast; I had gotten the impression it was kind of a hick/aggie/hippie thing; you know, actually about camping.
Now that I have a kid, I realize of course that it's really about getting rid of him for a week or two in midsummer, when there's no school and you're sick of trying to come up with ways to keep the kid from watching tv all day.
49: From your description it sounds more worthwhile. I had heard that it just tested whether you could take a position, without bothering with stuff like evidence. That was apparently a mistaken impression.
whole premise was that all kids should basically be learning algebra in 5th or 6th grade, that waiting until high school is all wrong
I agree completely with this. I felt like 6th, 7th, and most of 8th grade math were basically the same thing. Only at the end did the specifically pre-algebra stuff point towards something new.
51: My dad went to a summer-long camp every year from junior high until he went to college. My grandmother raised him single and camp made summers much easier for her with her work schedule. It certainly helped that he absolutely loved the camp too.
Yeah, what sucks especially is that they would do 6th, 7th, and 8th grade math, and then put people in "pre-algebra" in 9th grade. How much more fucking "pre" do you need?
Then again, some people simply concede that the point of middle school/junior high is not for kids to actually learn stuff, just to, you know, keep them occupied while they're freaking out from the onslaught of hormones.
52: Oh, they're very strict about the need for evidence. Unsupported assertions get very low scores. Now, it doesn't have to be accurate evidence--if a kid wants to write an essay that says the Magna Carta ended the Crimean War as fought between the United States and Mauritius, great. It can't be completely non-sensical, but factual errors don't matter.
I would like to add that, although I was in the boat of qualifying for CTY and not being able to afford to go, I was employed for a summer as an Assistant Dean, in charge of leading instructor training, procuring supplies, playing the dummy in various class exercises, and helping keep the wee-uns in line. (Ours was the 5th and 6th-grade version.) I was a little bitter, knowing that all of them were rich little smart kids, while they were simply patting themselves on the back for just being smart enough to be there. What I learned from that experience was that it's not so bad to spend 7 weeks with 11-year-olds, but it is a fire-ant-torture hell to spend 7 weeks with the kind of adults who desperately want to spend 7 weeks with 11-year-olds. I wanted to take a break at the end of the day to drink beer and watch adult movies, but they were too busy trading their favorite Goosebumps titles.
You math camp geeks. I went to mutha fuckin' Spanish Camp. (Or at least, that was what we called it. It was officially a G/o/verno/r's Ac/a/de/my.)
Take 60 rising high-school juniors and seniors. Bring them to Bum/fu/ck, Virginia. Make them speak only in Spanish for only a month. (N.B., program has since been shortened to three weeks.)
I hatedloved it. Even went back as an asistente (basically, RA, counselour, administrative assistant, go-fer, etc.).
But yeah, passing out while playing soccer in 100-degree heat in English: pretty ridiculous. Passing out while playing soccer in 100-degree heat en español: pinche gringo, carajo, hace un calor fatal.
I can't say that my lack of middle school algebra hurt me that much in the long run. I went to a different district's high school and covered algebra with the help of some tutoring sessions the summer after 8th grade in order to get on the track I'd have been on had I been in that other district's junior high schools. My friends in the district I left did turn out to be at a disadvantage in terms of getting to calculus before leaving high school.
I do think middle school effectively killed off whatever remained of the love I had for math in elementary school.
I went to Baptist camp, where they provide you with lots of opportunities to smoke cigarettes and make out, then harangue you at night about what a sinner you are and how you need to rededicate your life to Jesus.
I did something really bad and was forced to write a letter of apology to the camp director. It was my first lesson in insincerity.
65: I think it involved stealing large amounts of camp supplies (toilet paper, corn cobettes, &c.) and converting them into a weapon that we used to attack the boys' cabins at 4am. I was the ringleader. My parents said that yes, I did have to write the letter, although they were really proud of me for being a badass, and so it better not be a sincere letter. This was back when they were taking me to church on Sundays and sitting me down for viewings of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on weeknights.
I did sleep-away camp in middle school and that sucked a whole heap of ass. No way. I told my parents if they didn't want me around for a week they could let me camp in the woods behind the house, fine, yes, but not to put me with a hundred strangers and expect me to forge some sort of coming-of-age BS with them. My most vivid and frankly pleasant memory of that entire experience was shoving a kid in a back-brace into the lake. Yeah, I'm an asshole, but it was self-defense. He tried to drown me first. Wow, I guess I totally lied in another thread when I said the last time I hit someone was seventh grade. Didn't mean to, though. (Lie, that is.)
When I was in college I taught pre-algebra and astronomy to rising 7th graders at a summer program in Raleigh. It was very much not class-based (they went out of their way to recruit a cross-section of the local public school system) and being a teacher? That was awesome. On the day their school-year teachers came to observe, all the math teachers tried to harangue me for not letting the kids use calculators when they were doing basic probability problems. Pfffft. Wusses. The kids got it right once it was expected of them.
I never went to any sort of camp. Didn't want to, and when my parents wanted to get rid of me and my brothers, we were sent over to my grandmother's, who lived within walking distance of the beach. Problem solved.
The SO, however, is the biggest camp geek ever. She started going when she was pretty young, and it changed her life. Western Mass was a long way from Dorchester, in both physical and mental environment. So she went every year, then worked there every summer until she had to get a real job, served on various support committees after that, and now is on the Board of Directors for her camp and a couple of others run by the same organization. She drags my ass out there a few times a year, ostensibly to help with necessarily repairs, opening and closing the site, and so on. I go along mostly because it's understood I'll at some point sneak off to my own old stomping grounds in Northampton and visit Smith's art museum.
Every year on the weekend before camp opens, when that year's staff is fully assembled but the kids haven't arrived, they have a cookout and a bonfire down by the pond. It's dark, and there are often random fireworks going off in the distance (the camp usually opens within a week or so of the Fourth.) The senior staff take turns saying a few words, welcoming new counselors, saying what a special place the camp is and how it has helped them and so many others. Then the other kids can speak up and say how they feel about the camp, the upcoming summer, whatever. There is much singing of camp songs, and one can gets a glimpse of their relationships, actual and hoped for, the sense of self-discovery on the part of teenagers off largely by themselves have at that moment. Witnessing it several times now, I can only ever think two things: Larkin's line about "the strength and pain of being young" followed by the thought, "what a bunch of geeks."
Did anybody else have a "science camp" that their sixth-grade class went to for a week? Not sure why it was called that, there was not really any science on offer besides maybe a little astronomy/stargazing -- it was basically like summer camp except (a) it was your school class, (b) it was in the springtime, (c) only one week. I seem to remember enjoying it better than any of the summer camps I went to, which included YMCA, Boy Scout, and Church (UCC). I had issues generally with being on the very bottom of the social heirarchy, and it seems like these came up more intensely at summer camp.
Me with the standardized tests too. It's not that I enjoy them so much, but I always do freakishly well on them -- regardless of what I know about the subject, my sense of what the right answer is going to look like generally lines up with the test designer. I was actually kind of sad finishing the bar because it was the last standardized test that was ever going to make a difference in my life.
And speaking of CTY above -- I went to it two summers and indeed know one other regular Unfogged commenter from having been at CTY with him in the summer of 83-or-was-it-84.
41 -- I totally, totally agree that symbolic math and geometry should be introduced earlier. I don't have an argument developed but it has just always seemed intuitively obvious to me.
I was also sentenced with Baptist camp. I went every summer until the one after 9th grade, and though they spent a fair amount of time extolling the wickedness of teh sex while we spent a proportionate amount of time at least trying to make out with one another, the Baptists were in fact after secular music. It was demonstrated to me that this Jesus and I were incompatible when a counselor confiscated my Tool album and gave me . . . Michael W. Smith.
83: Exactly, Armsmasher. That kind of Puritanism is mixed with a "the Holy Spirit should have already made you hate yourself for this" look that is withering, especially when your own parents are cool with your secular-music listening.
I was a deeply religious person until church Youth Group convinced me that it was impossible to be a Christian girl without saying you'd never kiss until marriage and simultaneously doling out blowjobs to all the YG boys. I thought this was a localized hypocrisy until I went to camp.
76: I did that, in sixth-grade too. It was fun, but I didn't enjoy it as much as summer camp--cabins instead of tents, so it lacked that sense of authenticity.
When I was in high school, I actually went back to volunteer as a counselor with my old school (yes, I am a camp geek). I was treated as almost a peer by my old sixth-grade teacher, which was a cool experience.
I went four or five summers to a week-long all-girls Mormon camp. It almost doesn't count as camp because my mom always went too. (She seems to have been the only Mormon woman in Western California who knows every single hiking trial in the Sierras.)
It was at this camp, which I always referred to as "Camp Mormon for Girls," that I realized how weird was the version of the religion other kids were learning. "French kissing is bad because it's an analogy of sex" just struck me as stupid and ignorable. "No shorts higher than fingertip-length" also seemed to be an arbitrary, asinine rule since it wasn't like there were any boys around.
I knew a couple of people who went to Jewish summer camps; those seemed to be a LOT more fun.
One of the camp counselors told us in confidence in 8th grade that it was OK in God's eyes to get a handjob from a girl. Nevermind that we knew he was hooking up with one of the other counselors—the question then was whether it was OK to pray for handjobs. This led to some ex cathedra backtracking on the handjobs dispensation.
Side note: My brother is a Christian Spanish-language rapper! He lives in Abilene.
76: me too. but we learned about the fibonacci sequence by looking at nature (leaves & petals & seeds tend to be in fibonacci numbers, for reasons i still don't understand) and found frogs and sang songs, which i was inexplicably into at the time. it wasn't bad.
it *was* freezing cold though. tents?? i guess we were the super-discount deads of october 6th grade camping trip.
I went to a weeklong Methodist church camp with the theme "Jesus: the Rock that Doesn't Roll." I got in some hot water trying to explain that Twisted Sister really did espouse christian morality.
Boy Scout camp a couple years, and two week-long canoe trips in the Boundary Waters through the same Methodiust camp above. Those were the best.
CTY was three four of the best summers of my life. First date, first kiss... also got me into college (I ended up going to JHU, I'm convinced solely on being a CTY alum). I went to Dickinson and Franklin & Marshall (one year) for that...
Upthread Silvana gave a shout out for Int'l Baccalaureate (sp?) which I took some courses in. Theory of Knowledge was the only classical philosophy course I ever took, and has been immensely useful in trying to keep up here.
If Stanley's still around: did you have to do the thing where you learned Russian in Spanish at the sekrit Gov/ernor's A/cad/emy? Did it take? And I thought you guys did that at UVA? I applied, but a classmate of mine ended up being the one going.
Damn, but I hate CTY. The kids are incredibly annoying and rude when they're in groups, and there are always a few who think being labelled clever is grounds for being affectedly eccentric.
One weird experience of adulthood: learning that the sums of money that my parents regarded as dealbreakers (e..g, for CTY-type stuff) were actually not that large.
At Dickinson, CTY went on at the same time as the Redskins training camp (back when they used to train there). We were very respectful of the Redskins. You just have to gain 150 pounds and eat whole chickens in the cafeteria, Labs.
being labelled clever is grounds for being affectedly eccentric.
But, you just don't understand man. They just see the world differently, man. Stop trying to make them conform.
I knew I went to the wrong camps. I did a few summers at Boy Scout camp, which was teh lame as far as the uniforms go, but cool because of canoes and tents.
I went to rich Jewish camp, eight weeks a year from age 8 to age 16, then worked there two summers (alas, they didn't pay like a rich camp). And I mean rich- I was among the poorer kids there, some parents came to visit on parents' day by landing in their seaplane on the lake or landing their helicopter on the baseball field. It's where they filmed Meatballs. See here. Current price for 8 weeks is $5800 (depends on the Canadian exchange rate). I think it was around $3k when I went.
92: Really? I found TOK pretty useless. We had to submit two of our TOK essays for grading to the committee in Geneva, and mine were total crap, but I still managed to get a grade of "A" (wtf?), while they graded me a "D" on my extended essay, which I still maintain was a thing of brilliance for a 17-year-old (a literary-musical analysis of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth/Schiller's Ode).
The best thing that I got out of the IB program was the two-year European History course, which was rigorous as fuck.
100- I suppose so- there were a huge number of things to do to keep you happy, but they also had typical camp things- They made you take swimming lessons when the lake was cold, you had to try the crappy activities even if you didn't want to, unathletic people got cut from the intercamp softball team, etc.
My sister went to overnight camp in the Adirondacks from the third grade through the 9th and loved it until the last summer. I went to day camp, which I loved, through the 6th grade, and then I spent the summer before 7th grade at overnight camp in Maine which I didn't like at all. I got sick that summer. One of the muscles in my stomach got very tight, so I couldn't keep food down. (In fact for several years after I couldn't eat pancakes, because I associated them with that summer at camp, and they made me nauseous.) I puked a lot, and counselors would always take me to the nurse who would just tell me that I was homesick. At one point, I asked someone not to take me, because I didn't want to get into trouble agan. Not getting help from the nurse made me pretty homesick. Eventually, she took me to a doctor who prescribed some sort of muscle relaxing thing that I was to take 30 minutes before meals.
I also didn't liek swimming lessons when it was cold and rainy and the nasty drops they put in your ear.
The Center for Excellence in Education runs an uber-geek camp called the Research Summer Institute at MIT. (There's a satellite camp at CalTech.) That one is completely free, but it's for high school kids. They take classes for te first half of teh summer, but then they do research in labs and have to put out a research paper at the end of the summer.
I really don't like most standardized tests. I like certain multiple choice tests in content-based areas. I liked the AP US History multiple choice section, but I hated the English sections of teh SAT. I just felt that on the reading comprehension tests, they managed to pick really boring passages and that often all of the answers seemed to me to be wrong.
I was deeply suspicious of the tests that I had to take in grade school (5th-8th). Were these the Iowa Tests. The teacher told us that they didn't matter or count for anything, meaning that they wouldn't affect our grades. I asked her why we had to take them if they didn't count for anything. It wasn't that I didn't want to do something that wasn't for a grade. It was just that it seemed a logical absurdity to do something if it didn't matter, i.e. if it had no purpose. (I am not very good at doing rote tasks, if I don't know where it fits in the larger scheme of things or why I'm supposed to be doing it.)
I did pretty well on the Achievement Tests. (What are these now-defunct SAT II tests that you youngins talk about? That seems like an unnecessarily complicated and confusing name, BTW.) I also thought that it was kind of sad how much weight they were given, considereing how ridiculously easily they were graded. I placed out of my college language requirement when I got a 750 on the French Achievement Test. Okay, the AP French language exam that I took that same year also placed me out, and that didn't require a huge amoutn of mastery of the French language either, but it was a bit harder. (I was the only 10th grader in the class; it was mostly Juniors and Seniors, and I was oen of the best stydents, but it wasn't anything like as rigorous as the AS level my sister took in England.)
All y'all are proving my parents right: if I had been allowed to go anywhere as a kid, I would have had sex and partied! (This applied to going abroad with the church youth group, studying abroad in college, going to CTY (had there been the money), Governor's School, any sort of away camp.)
Lie. Say your summers were filled with chaste studies and glorious opportunities.
99: FL, are you sure you're not at my school? Here the Talented Gifted Overprivileged Brats Who Are Obviously Having Sex and Partying are busy defacing the campus and screeching for no reason.
Labs, I hear you- going through an extensive process to be told by adults that yes, as you suspected all along, you are special, does pretty atrocious things to your ego. Being let loose with four hundred of your peers who have been told the same... well be being a bystander to that would suck hard, I'd imagine. We were convinced we'd solved all the world's problems by week two (I was in the social sciences classes), and wanted everyone to know.
I will say that playing ultimate at CTY meant that I didn't have to be one of those people who played ultimate in college.
And Silvana- I didn't get the diploma (I only did one year of coursework) so I didn't have to take the exams you sent to Geneva for TOK. So I just floated in a sea of "What is Beauty?" "What is Truth?" for a year. After three years of public education, it was pretty mind-blowing.
it wasn't anything like as rigorous as the AS level my sister took in England
It is my, anecdotally derived, understanding that high-school level exams in the UK are quite a bit harder than the equivalent US exams. However, I have no defensible basis for this assertion other than causal conversations with American friends.
My parents didn't send me to things like CTY (I have no memory of whether my middle-school SAT scores got me that sort of mail, or even if I took the SAT in middle school) both because of the money and b/c they kinda objected to emphasizing the "gifted" thing, as being elitist. Which in a perverse way I think is kinda cool of them.
Yeah, my parents weren't keen on the 'gifted' thing -- the engineering thing was just an excuse to go to Glasgow for a week, it wasn't marketed as an 'elite' thing.
My Dad, to this day, is adamant that being smart is neither admirable nor interesting. Or, at least, no more admirable or interesting than having big feet, or being tall.
I couldn't afford CTY, but it didn't bother me at the time. It was only after I got to college and people talked about it fondly that I realized what a nerdtastic time I missed out on.
Instead, I went to Baptist church camp (and back as a counselor) *and* to Band Camp.
Wow. It pains me to write it all out, especially since I wasn't even mildly rebellious at either one- I earnestly Loved Jesus and Learned the Haltime Show, respectively.
82: Now I'm really disappointed, I was hoping that you'd taught at MathCamp, perhaps even a few years ago when I went there before high school.
This thread is way too much of a walk down geek-camp memory lane, though I'd completely forgotten that CTY and CTD (the midwest version run by Northwestern) had camps. Were those the ones you had to get over a 700 on one of the SAT sections to attend? Or was that just this random longitudinal nerd study that they were running?
Also, the Research Summer Institute run at MIT is pretty hardcore. The kids I knew in high school who attended used it to do projects for the Intel Talent Search, and most of them made at least semi-finalist.
Hey would this be the right thread to talk about how deeply, deeply fucked up my childhood was and what a large portion of the blame I lay at the door of the "Gifted and Talented" phenomenon, the "smart kid" categorization? Probably crossing over the borderline from Mineshafty discourse to TMI territory.
This seems as good a place as any. Hell, there was just a sudden twist into webcomics from happy camp times, might as well get weepy too. I'd be interested in seeing what people here think of the whole "gifted" deal, because I personally loved it.
I've never heard of CTY, like standardized tests quite a bit (especially as Sil said, the LSAT) and learned algebra in 3rd grade (I think) at my public school. Not that everyone did, but once they decided that I was up to that point in math, they thought I could do it. Teaching the LSAT was hard because I couldn't explain to other people how to do it, you just have to do it. I went to sleepaway camp in the Berkshires for awhile, not explicitly religious but surely more jews than anything else.
In contrast to the various Bible camps, there's Camp Quest.
"Camp Quest is the first residential summer camp in the history of the United States for the children of Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists, Brights, or whatever other terms might be applied to those who hold to a naturalistic, not supernatural world view."
Aimed directly at me and yet I can't stop rolling my eyes.
oh man, apo, that's hilarious. I love the heading "Camp Quest: It's beyond belief." Too clever. Everyone has to click through to see the horrible font; it's worse than comic sans.
126: Yes. Exactly. Partially due to gifted classes, which took me jarringly out of my home school for two afternoons a week, everyone hated my guts for about ten years. "Where is AWB going? To Gifted? Is that because she thinks she's smarter than us? Good thing she's such an ugly fat four-eyed lesbian!! Yay! AWB is UFFEL!!"
Is it just me, or is the term "brights" about as fucking irritating and arrogant a self-labelling as can be imagined? I fucking want to smash anyone who uses it in the face.
Everyone has to click through to see the horrible font; it's worse than comic sans.
It's called Hairspray, was a big favorite for a while for anything "playful" or to do with kids (along with Mr. Frisky). I still don't hate it when it's used for initial caps or as part of an illustration or whatever. This whole page is just badly designed though, and the way the font is used is stupid.
136 -- There were a couple of long threads about this like 3 years ago or whatever, around when Dennet advocated the terminology, on Crooked Timber and elsewhere. The concensus view is yours, or a slightly less bloodthirsty version of same.
Is it just me, or is the term "brights" about as fucking irritating and arrogant a self-labelling as can be imagined? I fucking want to smash anyone who uses it in the face.
I take it you're not referring to the headlights, are you? Does anyone actually use "brights" to describe smart people? That's just stupid enough to negate the self-labelling in any circumstances.
Oh man. Sadly you've touched a little class-based nerve for me. I never went to a sleepaway camp. Day camps (usually parks n' rec arts camps or something), sure, but growing up in Arizona, those fancy East Coast sleepaway camps were strictly the domain of my wealthier classmates. I was always pretty envious.
Now that I've typed this though, it occurs to me there must be sleepaway camps on the West Coast. Or are there? All the girls I knew when I was 12 who got to go away to camp went East -- but perhaps it's because they had family ties to that part of the country? I couldn't say.
Posted by Sommer | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:07 PM
I never had any interest in overnight camp. I went to day camp when I was little, and that was campy enough for me: we rode horses and made lanyards and all that crap.
Most of my friends in high school had gone to a YMCA camp, and my sister went to a music camp for several years, but I wasn't interested in either of those. My parents tried halfheartedly to get me to go to Jewish camp a couple of times, but they were all really far away (mostly in California) and I thought it was insane to go all that way.
(So yes, Sommer, there are sleepaway camps on the West Coast.)
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:12 PM
Thanks, Becks, for making me feel that maybe, just maybe, my debate with baa on the merits of Fiend Folio won't be the geekiest thing on Unfogged.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:15 PM
hope....such an irrational emotion.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:24 PM
Beat that big bad bug with the bug spray!
I never went to sleepaway camp, and during day camp, which was held in the park two miles from the house, it always rained. Like a rain dance, it was, girls singing around an old tree.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:25 PM
Sommer, I feel you. I was actually having some pangs of class-based angst when I wrote this and rewrote a few lines of the post based on it.
The sleepover camps I went to in sixth grade were in the Midwest close to where I lived and were run by the Boy/Girl Scouts and the YMCA (I wasn't a member of either, but I was happy to use them for their camps). They were pretty middle class and definitely not one of the fancy camps that some of my friends from school went to (but it was camp-camp and not day camp so I didn't care). I do realize that even the experience of going to one of the "discount" camps is one that many families can't afford, which is too bad because I think it's such a great experience for kids.
The camp I worked with in high school was actually a special program for at-risk youth and most of the kids had heavily (or completely) subsidized tuition. They were a really great group of kids and, cheesy as it is, it was probably the biggest difference I've ever made in someone's life. (I still get a letter or email from ex-campers every now and then saying thanks.) Working there definitely highlighted the class-based barriers a lot of kids have to camp because you saw how much they got out of it and couldn't help but wish more kids in similar situations could have that experience.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:29 PM
Oh! And I was always the counselor they put in charge of icebreakers and get-to-know-you games and all of those stupid cheers and chants they used to quiet the kids down.
I expect it's because I have a big mouth and no shame.
I also expect this is not a surprising revelation.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:31 PM
I was saddened to find out that Senator Jefferson Smith's summer camp was really a front for an elaborate operation to steal nickels and pennies from the children of America. Fortunately, Congress acted to restore honor and dignity to the Senate by voting for his expulsion.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:34 PM
You know, I don't think I ever realized as a kid that camp was a rich-kid thing. The camps my sister and my friends went to were pretty cheap; the Jewish camps were more expensive, and I later met a lot of people who went to them, many of whom were rich, spoiled kids from California, but it didn't occur to me to connect the two until much later. I didn't know anyone who went to very fancy camps.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:43 PM
I never had any camp experience (well, except for Seeds of Peace when I was 13), until I was a camp counselor in college, for—yeah, wait for it—Math camp.
Yes, I am a giant dork. But yeah, it was unbelievably fun, and I made some of my best friends there.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:44 PM
Yes, I am a giant dork.
I wouldn't be so sure. Have you looked at the next thread down?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:45 PM
But I have a lot of class-based camp anxiety, too. In 7th grade, me and a bunch of other kids took the SAT (I forget what the program was called.. talent search or some crap) and I scored high enough to go to the CTY thing at Johns Hopkins and I wanted to so badly, and it was like thousands of dollars. So, no.
Same thing happened in high schol with the Berklee (college of music) summer program, which I busted my ass trying to get in and get a scholarship for, and then they offered me—$500. The program tuition was $3500. Fuckers.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:48 PM
In 7th grade, me and a bunch of other kids took the SAT (I forget what the program was called.. talent search or some crap) and I scored high enough to go to the CTY thing at Johns Hopkins and I wanted to so badly, and it was like thousands of dollars. So, no.
I scored high enough for that, too! But it was $3000, so I couldn't go.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:50 PM
I had the same CTY experience as you, silvana. (and, on preview, Cala)
And I'm a little bit crushing on you for being a counselor at math camp. That's so uncool it's way cool.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:51 PM
Yup. It really kind of sucked, a lot.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:51 PM
It sounds like we have established that Unfogged is full of girls who liked to spend their Saturdays in seventh grade taking the SAT.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:53 PM
I'm curious how all of you learned about the Hopkins thing. I first heard of it last year, I think.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:53 PM
Oh my, are we nerds. There were only two or three kids from my high school that qualified. I can hardly breathe in this rarefied air!
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:53 PM
I took the SAT, and I got a lot of praise and a brochure in the mail, and then I couldn't go.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:54 PM
Meaning that's how I learned of it, of course. It was just a Thing That Happened. I think the SAT might even have been free.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:55 PM
I think my school counselor told me about it.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:56 PM
15 to 13.
Math camp was awesome because all the other counselors were way smarter than me, kids with 1600 SAT scores at MIT and Caltech and stuff. All the other counselors were people who had done the math camp when they were in high school, and worked their way up. The camp was a summer-long number theory course, which meant being a counselor involved sitting with them in "study group" and prodding them along on doing proofs, grading their work, etc. So rad. I manage to get in on it because I took a number theory course with the professor who ran the camp and he liked my work enough to hire me even though I'd never done the camp before.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:56 PM
I never got the class-based thing with camp. The ones I went to were Boy Scout camps, which were pretty inexpensive and very "rustic". No fancy-dancy cabins or dining halls for us, we slept in canvas tents and cooked our own meals.
I spent one summer working at a Boy Scout camp when I was 15, it was honestly the best job I ever had despite (or perhaps because of) still using the canvas tents even as counselors. And I figured out my actual pay rate once, conservatively based upon 6 12-hour work days per week, and it ended up being something like $.30/hour, but damn if those were the only paychecks I've ever felt I really earned. Looking back now, I realize that they gave me a shocking amount of responsibility for someone my age (I was effectively an area director), but at the time I just did the job and didn't think about that.
I most miss teaching my wilderness survival classes. Those were hella awesome.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 10:57 PM
Yeah, my middle school guidance counselor rounded up a group of about twenty-thirty "smart" kids to take the SAT. I think only two of us qualified. The other one was this guy, who I then went on to "date" in the eighth grade. Ah, good times.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:00 PM
16: Yeah, I'm not embarrassed to admit that I was fascinated by the SAT at age 10 (when my older sister was taking it and there were books around the house) and would do problems for fun.
I've got a standardized-test addiction problem.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:02 PM
Oh yeah, I did that CTY thing. I think my grandparents sprung for it, I remember it being not particularly cheap. Mine was up at Vassar, I really enjoyed it. Living in a college dorm for three weeks when you're in middle school is pretty sweet. We certainly dorked it up--free time was split between Magic: The Gathering and learning how to really play chess with some kids who were pretty good. It was also the first time I had ever asked a girl out, to the dance at the end of the session.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:06 PM
What is this CTY thing everyone's talking about?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:09 PM
This is the one I was accepted to.
When I was at math camp, I got my ass kicked in chess by fourteen-year-olds almost every day.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:09 PM
My middle school decided to stop teaching algebra to 8th graders in favor of a restructured high school curriculum that would cover it later (and supposedly faster). I think just about everyone in that school took almost exactly the same classes. I suppose that's not a bad way to run things, but it wasn't a whole lot of fun academically.
I've done math stuff for fun in the past, but have never liked standardized testing.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:10 PM
I used to love standardized tests, too. I was always really good at them. I used to look forward to the Iowa Test week because it was almost...relaxing. They always just seemed like a puzzle to me and not anything stressful. I'd go into the same zone that people must when they do crossword puzzles or play sudoku.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:11 PM
I went to a sleepaway camp for five years. Man, it was great. It even had its own school so we stayed there through Fall, Winter, And Spring. OK, they called it an orphanage or more formally a "Child Care Center" but I couldn't be fooled. We had counselors AND nuns and rarely saw our parents.
We even went—in shifts of a few weeks—to a place on Cape Cod each summer. It was the life I tell ya.
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:11 PM
Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. You take a test, and it qualifies you for nerd camp.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:11 PM
Preempted--32 to 27.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:12 PM
Huh. I had never heard of it before this thread.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:13 PM
The Iowa test! Man, I loved that thing. Not to mention the LSAT, which is the bestest standardized test evar.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:13 PM
I do like standardized tests.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:14 PM
I never went to sleep-away camp, either. I did do the parks 'n rec type-thing, as a kid, and I had a pretty good time with that, actually. It never occured to me that it was normal for people to go elsewhere and stay somewhere for camp; I'm not even sure I knew you could do that.
All I really remember about camp is swimming, running for the Kool-Aid ("bug juice"), and having a huge crush on one of the female counselors because she was nice to me a couple of times. Gawd, I was easy then.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:14 PM
(I think Labs's prophecy in 3 has been realized with this thread.)
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:15 PM
I found it disturbing to realize that I was actually happy that the section I got twice on the GRE was the analytical. I can't believe that's an essay section now.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:16 PM
My brother said the essay on the SAT wasn't bad. He got some crazy high score on that section and let's just say he didn't do well overall.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:17 PM
29: Oh, that makes me very mad! I spent an entire summer working at an organization whose whole premise was that all kids should basically be learning algebra in 5th or 6th grade, that waiting until high school is all wrong. It's kind of like a little religion for me, that notion.
One nice option about going to a K-12 school is that it was really easy for them to send me over to the high school for math and French classes, and other people for English, or whatever. Although when I got to high school they did away with the "honors English" course and just had everyone in the same classes.
That sucked, and is a bad idea generally.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:18 PM
I've heard the essay section of the SAT is both very easy and totally worthless to colleges, which don't know how to interpret the scores.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:19 PM
Also, I can't comprehend my brother's problems with the SAT/ACT/AP tests. I just don't get how he can't get it since those tests always came so naturally to me. I can't even relate. I suppose it's like him not being able to understand why I can't throw a curveball or whatever.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:20 PM
I wonder how much it is like the SAT II: Writing of old? 'Cause that was scored ridiculously easily, in my opinion.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:20 PM
I've heard it's basically just whether you can take a stand on an issue and defend it, and if you can, they give you a high score. Sounds totally worthless to me.
(Bear in mind that this is like third-hand information.)
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:22 PM
42: They shouldn't have much trouble interpreting the scores--it's just replacing the SAT II Writing test, which no longer exists. And it's easy in the sense that you don't have to be particularly creative, but you do need to be able to structure an argument and distinguish assertions from evidence, and so on.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:23 PM
It sounds like Matt knows what he's talking about.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:24 PM
I did poorly on the no essay "Achievement" test that the SAT II: Writing test replaced. I took the SAT II: Writing when it came out a year later and suddenly I didn't have to take the "get out of remedial English" test that my college would have made me take based on the earlier score.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:25 PM
Sounds totally worthless to me.
Not entirely. They're not grading on the merits of the argument, true, but that's the territory of the other subject tests. It tests whether you can organize your writing coherantly, content aside, which is a worthwhile skill.
(on preview to 47: I used to teach SAT classes)
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:28 PM
I am still annoyed that the SAT II: Writing couldn't get me out of freshman comp courses. I had to pay to take a departmental test that was like "write 300 words on the mood or theme of this poem." 300 words? Seriously? That's your test?
Actually, I'm bitter about class-exemption in general. I did the International Baccalaureate Diploma, which didn't end up getting me shit in the way of college credit, except for in foreign language, the one things that I wanted to take anyway.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:29 PM
West coast 4-H camp was fun and it must've been cheap, b/c my sister and I both went a couple times. I had no idea until college that camp was some class issue on the east coast; I had gotten the impression it was kind of a hick/aggie/hippie thing; you know, actually about camping.
Now that I have a kid, I realize of course that it's really about getting rid of him for a week or two in midsummer, when there's no school and you're sick of trying to come up with ways to keep the kid from watching tv all day.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:31 PM
49: From your description it sounds more worthwhile. I had heard that it just tested whether you could take a position, without bothering with stuff like evidence. That was apparently a mistaken impression.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:31 PM
whole premise was that all kids should basically be learning algebra in 5th or 6th grade, that waiting until high school is all wrong
I agree completely with this. I felt like 6th, 7th, and most of 8th grade math were basically the same thing. Only at the end did the specifically pre-algebra stuff point towards something new.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:32 PM
51: My dad went to a summer-long camp every year from junior high until he went to college. My grandmother raised him single and camp made summers much easier for her with her work schedule. It certainly helped that he absolutely loved the camp too.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:36 PM
Yeah, what sucks especially is that they would do 6th, 7th, and 8th grade math, and then put people in "pre-algebra" in 9th grade. How much more fucking "pre" do you need?
Then again, some people simply concede that the point of middle school/junior high is not for kids to actually learn stuff, just to, you know, keep them occupied while they're freaking out from the onslaught of hormones.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:38 PM
I don't think I learned anything in middle school. It was definitely the low point of my academic experience.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:41 PM
52: Oh, they're very strict about the need for evidence. Unsupported assertions get very low scores. Now, it doesn't have to be accurate evidence--if a kid wants to write an essay that says the Magna Carta ended the Crimean War as fought between the United States and Mauritius, great. It can't be completely non-sensical, but factual errors don't matter.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:41 PM
yeah, wait for it—Math camp.
I went to science camp at Appalachian State University every summer from the 7th grade 'til I graduated from high school.
I forget what the program was called.. talent search or some crap
Talent Identification Program?
30 is my experience with standardized tests to a tee.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:46 PM
I learned algebra in middle school. And I was on the math team.
The rest of it, academically, was pretty much a waste, yeah.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:48 PM
I learned algebra in middle school too, but it was a special district-wide program. The classes at my middle school were mostly a waste of time.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:49 PM
I would like to add that, although I was in the boat of qualifying for CTY and not being able to afford to go, I was employed for a summer as an Assistant Dean, in charge of leading instructor training, procuring supplies, playing the dummy in various class exercises, and helping keep the wee-uns in line. (Ours was the 5th and 6th-grade version.) I was a little bitter, knowing that all of them were rich little smart kids, while they were simply patting themselves on the back for just being smart enough to be there. What I learned from that experience was that it's not so bad to spend 7 weeks with 11-year-olds, but it is a fire-ant-torture hell to spend 7 weeks with the kind of adults who desperately want to spend 7 weeks with 11-year-olds. I wanted to take a break at the end of the day to drink beer and watch adult movies, but they were too busy trading their favorite Goosebumps titles.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:50 PM
You math camp geeks. I went to mutha fuckin' Spanish Camp. (Or at least, that was what we called it. It was officially a G/o/verno/r's Ac/a/de/my.)
Take 60 rising high-school juniors and seniors. Bring them to Bum/fu/ck, Virginia. Make them speak only in Spanish for only a month. (N.B., program has since been shortened to three weeks.)
I
hatedloved it. Even went back as an asistente (basically, RA, counselour, administrative assistant, go-fer, etc.).But yeah, passing out while playing soccer in 100-degree heat in English: pretty ridiculous. Passing out while playing soccer in 100-degree heat en español: pinche gringo, carajo, hace un calor fatal.
O, Spanish Camp.
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:56 PM
I can't say that my lack of middle school algebra hurt me that much in the long run. I went to a different district's high school and covered algebra with the help of some tutoring sessions the summer after 8th grade in order to get on the track I'd have been on had I been in that other district's junior high schools. My friends in the district I left did turn out to be at a disadvantage in terms of getting to calculus before leaving high school.
I do think middle school effectively killed off whatever remained of the love I had for math in elementary school.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-20-06 11:59 PM
I went to Baptist camp, where they provide you with lots of opportunities to smoke cigarettes and make out, then harangue you at night about what a sinner you are and how you need to rededicate your life to Jesus.
I did something really bad and was forced to write a letter of apology to the camp director. It was my first lesson in insincerity.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:03 AM
I did something really bad
Do tell!
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:12 AM
Not for a movie reference, but I also really did go to band camp (nothing like the movie, by the by) for all four years of high school.
This camp was work, however. LEARN the halftime show. LEARN the drumline cadences. SMOKE cigarettes on the mountain with the other bad kids.
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:12 AM
I did band day camp, and yeah, it was work. I didn't smoke, though. I was totally a good girl in school.
Nowadays my bad behavior seems mostly to consist of staying up way too late. 'Night, all.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:14 AM
Good night, B.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:18 AM
65: I think it involved stealing large amounts of camp supplies (toilet paper, corn cobettes, &c.) and converting them into a weapon that we used to attack the boys' cabins at 4am. I was the ringleader. My parents said that yes, I did have to write the letter, although they were really proud of me for being a badass, and so it better not be a sincere letter. This was back when they were taking me to church on Sundays and sitting me down for viewings of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on weeknights.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:18 AM
I should go to bed too. I have to drive tomorrow.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:20 AM
Yeah, good night from me too. Big softball game tomorrow!
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:23 AM
'Night, all.
I haven't slept a decent night in a few weeks.
Maybe I'll just sleep when I get to London.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:23 AM
Re: 10,14,22 Holy shit. Capital M Capital C Math Camp of http://www.mathcamp.org/ fame?
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:41 AM
I did sleep-away camp in middle school and that sucked a whole heap of ass. No way. I told my parents if they didn't want me around for a week they could let me camp in the woods behind the house, fine, yes, but not to put me with a hundred strangers and expect me to forge some sort of coming-of-age BS with them. My most vivid and frankly pleasant memory of that entire experience was shoving a kid in a back-brace into the lake. Yeah, I'm an asshole, but it was self-defense. He tried to drown me first. Wow, I guess I totally lied in another thread when I said the last time I hit someone was seventh grade. Didn't mean to, though. (Lie, that is.)
When I was in college I taught pre-algebra and astronomy to rising 7th graders at a summer program in Raleigh. It was very much not class-based (they went out of their way to recruit a cross-section of the local public school system) and being a teacher? That was awesome. On the day their school-year teachers came to observe, all the math teachers tried to harangue me for not letting the kids use calculators when they were doing basic probability problems. Pfffft. Wusses. The kids got it right once it was expected of them.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:42 AM
I never went to any sort of camp. Didn't want to, and when my parents wanted to get rid of me and my brothers, we were sent over to my grandmother's, who lived within walking distance of the beach. Problem solved.
The SO, however, is the biggest camp geek ever. She started going when she was pretty young, and it changed her life. Western Mass was a long way from Dorchester, in both physical and mental environment. So she went every year, then worked there every summer until she had to get a real job, served on various support committees after that, and now is on the Board of Directors for her camp and a couple of others run by the same organization. She drags my ass out there a few times a year, ostensibly to help with necessarily repairs, opening and closing the site, and so on. I go along mostly because it's understood I'll at some point sneak off to my own old stomping grounds in Northampton and visit Smith's art museum.
Every year on the weekend before camp opens, when that year's staff is fully assembled but the kids haven't arrived, they have a cookout and a bonfire down by the pond. It's dark, and there are often random fireworks going off in the distance (the camp usually opens within a week or so of the Fourth.) The senior staff take turns saying a few words, welcoming new counselors, saying what a special place the camp is and how it has helped them and so many others. Then the other kids can speak up and say how they feel about the camp, the upcoming summer, whatever. There is much singing of camp songs, and one can gets a glimpse of their relationships, actual and hoped for, the sense of self-discovery on the part of teenagers off largely by themselves have at that moment. Witnessing it several times now, I can only ever think two things: Larkin's line about "the strength and pain of being young" followed by the thought, "what a bunch of geeks."
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:41 AM
Did anybody else have a "science camp" that their sixth-grade class went to for a week? Not sure why it was called that, there was not really any science on offer besides maybe a little astronomy/stargazing -- it was basically like summer camp except (a) it was your school class, (b) it was in the springtime, (c) only one week. I seem to remember enjoying it better than any of the summer camps I went to, which included YMCA, Boy Scout, and Church (UCC). I had issues generally with being on the very bottom of the social heirarchy, and it seems like these came up more intensely at summer camp.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 6:15 AM
new indicator for unfoggedtarianism? loves standardized tests. along with grade-skipping and, what was it? left-handedness?
geekismo!
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 6:23 AM
Me with the standardized tests too. It's not that I enjoy them so much, but I always do freakishly well on them -- regardless of what I know about the subject, my sense of what the right answer is going to look like generally lines up with the test designer. I was actually kind of sad finishing the bar because it was the last standardized test that was ever going to make a difference in my life.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 6:26 AM
And speaking of CTY above -- I went to it two summers and indeed know one other regular Unfogged commenter from having been at CTY with him in the summer of 83-or-was-it-84.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 6:29 AM
41 -- I totally, totally agree that symbolic math and geometry should be introduced earlier. I don't have an argument developed but it has just always seemed intuitively obvious to me.
Posted by cty | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 6:36 AM
Weird. 80 is me.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 6:43 AM
73: No.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:10 AM
I was also sentenced with Baptist camp. I went every summer until the one after 9th grade, and though they spent a fair amount of time extolling the wickedness of teh sex while we spent a proportionate amount of time at least trying to make out with one another, the Baptists were in fact after secular music. It was demonstrated to me that this Jesus and I were incompatible when a counselor confiscated my Tool album and gave me . . . Michael W. Smith.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:23 AM
83: Exactly, Armsmasher. That kind of Puritanism is mixed with a "the Holy Spirit should have already made you hate yourself for this" look that is withering, especially when your own parents are cool with your secular-music listening.
I was a deeply religious person until church Youth Group convinced me that it was impossible to be a Christian girl without saying you'd never kiss until marriage and simultaneously doling out blowjobs to all the YG boys. I thought this was a localized hypocrisy until I went to camp.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:31 AM
76: I did that, in sixth-grade too. It was fun, but I didn't enjoy it as much as summer camp--cabins instead of tents, so it lacked that sense of authenticity.
When I was in high school, I actually went back to volunteer as a counselor with my old school (yes, I am a camp geek). I was treated as almost a peer by my old sixth-grade teacher, which was a cool experience.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:34 AM
I went four or five summers to a week-long all-girls Mormon camp. It almost doesn't count as camp because my mom always went too. (She seems to have been the only Mormon woman in Western California who knows every single hiking trial in the Sierras.)
It was at this camp, which I always referred to as "Camp Mormon for Girls," that I realized how weird was the version of the religion other kids were learning. "French kissing is bad because it's an analogy of sex" just struck me as stupid and ignorable. "No shorts higher than fingertip-length" also seemed to be an arbitrary, asinine rule since it wasn't like there were any boys around.
I knew a couple of people who went to Jewish summer camps; those seemed to be a LOT more fun.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:52 AM
One of the camp counselors told us in confidence in 8th grade that it was OK in God's eyes to get a handjob from a girl. Nevermind that we knew he was hooking up with one of the other counselors—the question then was whether it was OK to pray for handjobs. This led to some ex cathedra backtracking on the handjobs dispensation.
Side note: My brother is a Christian Spanish-language rapper! He lives in Abilene.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:57 AM
My cousin is a white Baptist rapper in Ok/la/ho/ma! (I'm sure he's googling "white baptist rapper in OK" pretty much hourly.)
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:03 AM
85: "76" s/b "84"
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:05 AM
76: me too. but we learned about the fibonacci sequence by looking at nature (leaves & petals & seeds tend to be in fibonacci numbers, for reasons i still don't understand) and found frogs and sang songs, which i was inexplicably into at the time. it wasn't bad.
it *was* freezing cold though. tents?? i guess we were the super-discount deads of october 6th grade camping trip.
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:07 AM
I went to a weeklong Methodist church camp with the theme "Jesus: the Rock that Doesn't Roll." I got in some hot water trying to explain that Twisted Sister really did espouse christian morality.
Boy Scout camp a couple years, and two week-long canoe trips in the Boundary Waters through the same Methodiust camp above. Those were the best.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:24 AM
Man, this thread hit a couple of nerves:
CTY was
threefour of the best summers of my life. First date, first kiss... also got me into college (I ended up going to JHU, I'm convinced solely on being a CTY alum). I went to Dickinson and Franklin & Marshall (one year) for that...Upthread Silvana gave a shout out for Int'l Baccalaureate (sp?) which I took some courses in. Theory of Knowledge was the only classical philosophy course I ever took, and has been immensely useful in trying to keep up here.
If Stanley's still around: did you have to do the thing where you learned Russian in Spanish at the sekrit Gov/ernor's A/cad/emy? Did it take? And I thought you guys did that at UVA? I applied, but a classmate of mine ended up being the one going.
Posted by mike d | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:25 AM
He lives in Abilene
Texas or Kansas?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:27 AM
Damn, but I hate CTY. The kids are incredibly annoying and rude when they're in groups, and there are always a few who think being labelled clever is grounds for being affectedly eccentric.
One weird experience of adulthood: learning that the sums of money that my parents regarded as dealbreakers (e..g, for CTY-type stuff) were actually not that large.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:27 AM
At Dickinson, CTY went on at the same time as the Redskins training camp (back when they used to train there). We were very respectful of the Redskins. You just have to gain 150 pounds and eat whole chickens in the cafeteria, Labs.
being labelled clever is grounds for being affectedly eccentric.
But, you just don't understand man. They just see the world differently, man. Stop trying to make them conform.
Posted by mike d | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:33 AM
doling out blowjobs to all the YG boys
I knew I went to the wrong camps. I did a few summers at Boy Scout camp, which was teh lame as far as the uniforms go, but cool because of canoes and tents.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:34 AM
I went to rich Jewish camp, eight weeks a year from age 8 to age 16, then worked there two summers (alas, they didn't pay like a rich camp). And I mean rich- I was among the poorer kids there, some parents came to visit on parents' day by landing in their seaplane on the lake or landing their helicopter on the baseball field. It's where they filmed Meatballs. See here. Current price for 8 weeks is $5800 (depends on the Canadian exchange rate). I think it was around $3k when I went.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:34 AM
Fuck! I got zero blowjobs at my Baptist camp! AWB, where were you when I needed you?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:35 AM
Sorry to hate on you, mike d, and I'm sure you were charming and handsome back then, but those children are terrible. They also suck at frisbee.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:36 AM
97--Was your rich Jewish camp hedonistic? If not, please just lie to me.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:36 AM
92: Really? I found TOK pretty useless. We had to submit two of our TOK essays for grading to the committee in Geneva, and mine were total crap, but I still managed to get a grade of "A" (wtf?), while they graded me a "D" on my extended essay, which I still maintain was a thing of brilliance for a 17-year-old (a literary-musical analysis of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth/Schiller's Ode).
The best thing that I got out of the IB program was the two-year European History course, which was rigorous as fuck.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:36 AM
When I was 15 I went to a week-long residential thing at Strathclyde Uni for kids who were gifted at engineering and physics.
Having the kids all stay in a student hall of residence right in the centre of Glasgow surrounded by pubs and clubs was maybe not the wisest idea.
There was a lot of sex and drinking going on that week.
Happy days.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:39 AM
100- I suppose so- there were a huge number of things to do to keep you happy, but they also had typical camp things- They made you take swimming lessons when the lake was cold, you had to try the crappy activities even if you didn't want to, unathletic people got cut from the intercamp softball team, etc.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:40 AM
My sister went to overnight camp in the Adirondacks from the third grade through the 9th and loved it until the last summer. I went to day camp, which I loved, through the 6th grade, and then I spent the summer before 7th grade at overnight camp in Maine which I didn't like at all. I got sick that summer. One of the muscles in my stomach got very tight, so I couldn't keep food down. (In fact for several years after I couldn't eat pancakes, because I associated them with that summer at camp, and they made me nauseous.) I puked a lot, and counselors would always take me to the nurse who would just tell me that I was homesick. At one point, I asked someone not to take me, because I didn't want to get into trouble agan. Not getting help from the nurse made me pretty homesick. Eventually, she took me to a doctor who prescribed some sort of muscle relaxing thing that I was to take 30 minutes before meals.
I also didn't liek swimming lessons when it was cold and rainy and the nasty drops they put in your ear.
The Center for Excellence in Education runs an uber-geek camp called the Research Summer Institute at MIT. (There's a satellite camp at CalTech.) That one is completely free, but it's for high school kids. They take classes for te first half of teh summer, but then they do research in labs and have to put out a research paper at the end of the summer.
I really don't like most standardized tests. I like certain multiple choice tests in content-based areas. I liked the AP US History multiple choice section, but I hated the English sections of teh SAT. I just felt that on the reading comprehension tests, they managed to pick really boring passages and that often all of the answers seemed to me to be wrong.
I was deeply suspicious of the tests that I had to take in grade school (5th-8th). Were these the Iowa Tests. The teacher told us that they didn't matter or count for anything, meaning that they wouldn't affect our grades. I asked her why we had to take them if they didn't count for anything. It wasn't that I didn't want to do something that wasn't for a grade. It was just that it seemed a logical absurdity to do something if it didn't matter, i.e. if it had no purpose. (I am not very good at doing rote tasks, if I don't know where it fits in the larger scheme of things or why I'm supposed to be doing it.)
I did pretty well on the Achievement Tests. (What are these now-defunct SAT II tests that you youngins talk about? That seems like an unnecessarily complicated and confusing name, BTW.) I also thought that it was kind of sad how much weight they were given, considereing how ridiculously easily they were graded. I placed out of my college language requirement when I got a 750 on the French Achievement Test. Okay, the AP French language exam that I took that same year also placed me out, and that didn't require a huge amoutn of mastery of the French language either, but it was a bit harder. (I was the only 10th grader in the class; it was mostly Juniors and Seniors, and I was oen of the best stydents, but it wasn't anything like as rigorous as the AS level my sister took in England.)
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:44 AM
All y'all are proving my parents right: if I had been allowed to go anywhere as a kid, I would have had sex and partied! (This applied to going abroad with the church youth group, studying abroad in college, going to CTY (had there been the money), Governor's School, any sort of away camp.)
Lie. Say your summers were filled with chaste studies and glorious opportunities.
99: FL, are you sure you're not at my school? Here the Talented Gifted Overprivileged Brats Who Are Obviously Having Sex and Partying are busy defacing the campus and screeching for no reason.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:47 AM
Labs, I hear you- going through an extensive process to be told by adults that yes, as you suspected all along, you are special, does pretty atrocious things to your ego. Being let loose with four hundred of your peers who have been told the same... well be being a bystander to that would suck hard, I'd imagine. We were convinced we'd solved all the world's problems by week two (I was in the social sciences classes), and wanted everyone to know.
I will say that playing ultimate at CTY meant that I didn't have to be one of those people who played ultimate in college.
And Silvana- I didn't get the diploma (I only did one year of coursework) so I didn't have to take the exams you sent to Geneva for TOK. So I just floated in a sea of "What is Beauty?" "What is Truth?" for a year. After three years of public education, it was pretty mind-blowing.
Posted by mike d | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:47 AM
I love standardized tests- the modern education system was deisgned with my abilities in mind.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:51 AM
re: 104
it wasn't anything like as rigorous as the AS level my sister took in England
It is my, anecdotally derived, understanding that high-school level exams in the UK are quite a bit harder than the equivalent US exams. However, I have no defensible basis for this assertion other than causal conversations with American friends.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:52 AM
That should be casual conversations.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:53 AM
No. Your conversations retroactively ruined the US school system.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:54 AM
My parents didn't send me to things like CTY (I have no memory of whether my middle-school SAT scores got me that sort of mail, or even if I took the SAT in middle school) both because of the money and b/c they kinda objected to emphasizing the "gifted" thing, as being elitist. Which in a perverse way I think is kinda cool of them.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:55 AM
Gosh, Cala, that would be funny.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:55 AM
re: 111
Yeah, my parents weren't keen on the 'gifted' thing -- the engineering thing was just an excuse to go to Glasgow for a week, it wasn't marketed as an 'elite' thing.
My Dad, to this day, is adamant that being smart is neither admirable nor interesting. Or, at least, no more admirable or interesting than having big feet, or being tall.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:57 AM
I couldn't afford CTY, but it didn't bother me at the time. It was only after I got to college and people talked about it fondly that I realized what a nerdtastic time I missed out on.
Instead, I went to Baptist church camp (and back as a counselor) *and* to Band Camp.
Wow. It pains me to write it all out, especially since I wasn't even mildly rebellious at either one- I earnestly Loved Jesus and Learned the Haltime Show, respectively.
I've got some serious catching up to do.
Posted by plain | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:00 AM
Oh, apropos of nothing, this cartoon - http://xkcd.com/c108.html - is teh funny.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:03 AM
82: Now I'm really disappointed, I was hoping that you'd taught at MathCamp, perhaps even a few years ago when I went there before high school.
This thread is way too much of a walk down geek-camp memory lane, though I'd completely forgotten that CTY and CTD (the midwest version run by Northwestern) had camps. Were those the ones you had to get over a 700 on one of the SAT sections to attend? Or was that just this random longitudinal nerd study that they were running?
Also, the Research Summer Institute run at MIT is pretty hardcore. The kids I knew in high school who attended used it to do projects for the Intel Talent Search, and most of them made at least semi-finalist.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:09 AM
Oh, I love xkcd!
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:10 AM
My favorites are this and this.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:17 AM
93: Texas.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:18 AM
118 -- I love the Schroedinger's comic but do not get the Poisson Distribution thingy.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:21 AM
Also, Hey, look, I got Linux running on my tonsils! is So. Awesome.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:22 AM
(Funniness is a wave form.)
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:23 AM
Today's dino comics, which Ben sent me, is brilliant. Although there are no bananas in it.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:24 AM
Today's A Softer World seems appropriate for this crowd.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:30 AM
The links in 123 and 124 are both great.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:36 AM
Hey would this be the right thread to talk about how deeply, deeply fucked up my childhood was and what a large portion of the blame I lay at the door of the "Gifted and Talented" phenomenon, the "smart kid" categorization? Probably crossing over the borderline from Mineshafty discourse to TMI territory.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:01 AM
(126 written with perlocutionary intent)
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:02 AM
This seems as good a place as any. Hell, there was just a sudden twist into webcomics from happy camp times, might as well get weepy too. I'd be interested in seeing what people here think of the whole "gifted" deal, because I personally loved it.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:04 AM
would this be the right thread
Isn't every thread here a thinly veiled open thread?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:05 AM
Oh, go ahead. I probably have stories about as bad.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:06 AM
Actually, I put up a fresh thread for the new subject.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:08 AM
I've never heard of CTY, like standardized tests quite a bit (especially as Sil said, the LSAT) and learned algebra in 3rd grade (I think) at my public school. Not that everyone did, but once they decided that I was up to that point in math, they thought I could do it. Teaching the LSAT was hard because I couldn't explain to other people how to do it, you just have to do it. I went to sleepaway camp in the Berkshires for awhile, not explicitly religious but surely more jews than anything else.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:16 AM
In contrast to the various Bible camps, there's Camp Quest.
"Camp Quest is the first residential summer camp in the history of the United States for the children of Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists, Brights, or whatever other terms might be applied to those who hold to a naturalistic, not supernatural world view."
Aimed directly at me and yet I can't stop rolling my eyes.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:19 AM
oh man, apo, that's hilarious. I love the heading "Camp Quest: It's beyond belief." Too clever. Everyone has to click through to see the horrible font; it's worse than comic sans.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:26 AM
126: Yes. Exactly. Partially due to gifted classes, which took me jarringly out of my home school for two afternoons a week, everyone hated my guts for about ten years. "Where is AWB going? To Gifted? Is that because she thinks she's smarter than us? Good thing she's such an ugly fat four-eyed lesbian!! Yay! AWB is UFFEL!!"
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:35 AM
Is it just me, or is the term "brights" about as fucking irritating and arrogant a self-labelling as can be imagined? I fucking want to smash anyone who uses it in the face.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:36 PM
136: No, you're completely right, and would be completely in the right.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:38 PM
Everyone has to click through to see the horrible font; it's worse than comic sans.
It's called Hairspray, was a big favorite for a while for anything "playful" or to do with kids (along with Mr. Frisky). I still don't hate it when it's used for initial caps or as part of an illustration or whatever. This whole page is just badly designed though, and the way the font is used is stupid.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:02 PM
136 -- There were a couple of long threads about this like 3 years ago or whatever, around when Dennet advocated the terminology, on Crooked Timber and elsewhere. The concensus view is yours, or a slightly less bloodthirsty version of same.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:13 PM
- By any chance did any of you go to camp in Cullowhee, North Carolina, called The Cullowhee Experience?
- I got the IB diploma, did the TOK and 2-year courses and the whole nine yards. I guess it's useful.
Posted by BGR | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 2:39 PM
Is it just me, or is the term "brights" about as fucking irritating and arrogant a self-labelling as can be imagined? I fucking want to smash anyone who uses it in the face.
I take it you're not referring to the headlights, are you? Does anyone actually use "brights" to describe smart people? That's just stupid enough to negate the self-labelling in any circumstances.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:31 PM
136: Not just you.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 6:08 PM
Has anyone ever actually met one of these "Bright" people in real life, or is this just a crazy internet thing?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 6:19 PM