That's so scary, Corwood.

I remember the summer that Joliet was dubbed by the National Enquirer as "Murder Town"--we had 17 unsolved murders that summer (in addition to the solved ones), and a lot of them were just unusual killings. Five people were murdered in a craft store one Saturday morning (a friend of my mom's was driving by it about 30 minutes before the murders and debating if she was going to stop, but decided not to, thank God). Later that month, someone was pulled over to the side of I-55 near I-80, and when the state trooper pulled behind to see what was wrong, the person came out with guns blazing and killed the trooper before driving off.

Those were the two that stand out in my mind--I don't know if they ever solved either of those cases.

Mrs. Howren, you bitch, I still hate you -- accused me of lying about having finished some baby book we were assigned. She wouldn't even ask me me questions about it -- she humiliated me in front of the whole class, told me no one could have read it that fast, I was lying to get attention, and that I should never contradict her.

Bad teachers suck. I don't recall having any really bad teachers, just a sucky middle school counselor, but you don't have to deal with a counselor every day.

I learned to read in school. I remember learning to spell my name. The teacher pointed to her eye for the I in Jennifer. It cracks me up that I was in school but couldn't spell my name??? That wouldn't happen today, would it? Eh, I was a quick study once I got the hang of it. Blew the rest of those little kids away, I did. Except for Melanie. She was my frenemisis academically during kindergarten. Always neck and neck.

I can't remember if I knew how to read before going to school. Both my kids did, but that doesn't seem unusual anymore.

I had a couple doozies of bad teachers, and at least one who'd been fired as principal of another school who was mean and hated me. My very next teacher took an interest in me, and used to bring in books from her own collection for me to read.

It averaged out, but it shouldn't have had to, not from abusive.

Oh, in Kindergarten, I was totally taken out of the room while the other kids learned to read! I forgot about that. They had an older kid read with me instead, which seems really smart to me now -- I'm sure it helped the older kid, too.

In kindergarten, me and my nemesis Cindy had to sit out in the empty hallway, unsupervised, doing phonetics when everyone else was learning to read. Lame.

We were streamed pretty early, but didn't have official G&T until 7 or 8th grade. I always thought G&T was pretty unfair as it mostly amounted to cool field trips that I'm sure most students could have benefitted from (as much as, if not more than me).

Erin, there's just the occasional teacher that I fantasize about going back, looking up, and kicking their ass, HARD. In my case, it was the PE teacher I had in grades 1-3. Yelling at shy little girls wearing glasses really doesn't help in any material way....

I was lucky not to have a Mrs. Howren (what a bitch!!). The closest I ever got to humiliation by a teacher was the time I went up to Mrs. Egan in 3rd grade math to ask her why my 3-digit multiplications were not coming up right, and she had to point out my stupidity in not using the right number of zeroes to the whole class. She was normally a great teacher, so I think she just decided to use my mistake as an example to everyone else, but I felt humiliated.

Everybody was on a more or less equal footing coming in and you weren't pegged with certain roles as "the smart one" in class. Everybody was the smart one.

This is what I liked about streaming.

Corwood, I'm sorry for the tragedy in your town. And thank you for all the recommendations in Literary; I now have a teetering stack of books on my desk (and also just happened to pick up the Oxford American that you are in!)

Gud, someone (Plei?) pointed out elsewhere that "gifted" often means "doesn't learn quite like others" and the skills required to be successful in honors/AP are very normative - no quirky learners. The definition of "gifted" seems to vary a lot, but it doesn't necessarily coincide with smart or intelligent. Edit: badly phrased - you can be hella smart but not gifted, and you can be gifted, but not succeed in AP Chemistry, is what I am trying to say.