You're in first grade and you're already solving long division and acing those Mad Math Minute drills in 30 seconds flat. You are driving your teacher insane because you are bored out of your head and cannot understand how the other kids don't get that anything times one is the same number, so you've started bringing your GameBoy to school instead.

So what happens next? (Besides having to sit out of recess, that is.) You get pulled out of class and told you're going to take a test. So you're thinking, "ugh, just because I do better than the other kids doesn't mean I should take extra tests!" But lo and behold, it's unlike any test you've ever seen before.

It's got pictures and diagrams, asking you what might come next or what doesn't belong. Some of us were handed a set of colored blocks and a strip of paper with instructions reading something like:

1. There is a red block above the green block.
2. The bottom block is not yellow.
3. There is a blue block directly adjacent to the green block.
4. There are at least 2 red blocks.

I made those directions up, so don't try to solve the puzzle.

Anyway, if all went well, which is likely if you're still reading this post, you got called into a meeting with another teacher and told that you could leave school one day a week and go to a special program. I don't know about you, but I said heck yeah - I'd take a day away from these slackers anytime!

If you were a super-nerd like I bet you were, you'd repeat this process at least a couple more times. I personally took these gifted tests 5 times: once in Norfolk for their Field Lighthouse program, again when I moved to Virginia Beach halfway through second grade for ODC, yet again for KLMS, then for the Math/Science Academy at Ocean Lakes, and then finally for my senior year, when I doubled up on the magnet programs and went to the Governor's School for the Arts in the afternoons. Okay, fine, that final one was really a music audition and not a creative thinking test, but you know what I mean.

For those of you who don't have any clue as to what I'm talking about, well, I'm sorry you missed out!