Seems to me like there are some dance routines that are basic to our experience as schoolchildren. First we learn little things like ring-around-the-rosy (morbid, much?), then it's the hokey pokey, then it's square or line dancing (at least, that's what happened at Fairfield Elementary), and so on and so forth, until finally we enter the realm of school dances.

School dances in Virginia Beach are nothing like what I keep seeing in movies or on the TV. We didn't have punch bowls or a live band. I already did a short bit about school dances though, so I'll keep moving. Anyway, no school dance would be complete without a DJ to play all the greatest group dance hits - the Chicken Dance, the Electric Slide, YMCA, the Cha-Cha Slide, or the Macarena.

If you don't know the Macarena dance for who-knows-what reason, there's even an instructional video on it, complete with children who shouldn't be shaking their hips:



Now for the full song, so you can put your newly acquired dancing skills to the test:



I was going to find the rest of those dances, but I've gotta get back to work for now. Maybe next time I feel like you need a little torture. I'm sure you're already cursing me for the Macarena.

Correct me if I'm remembering wrong, but the third grade social studies I recall focused on Virginia history, especially that of Virginia Beach. We learned about the seven boroughs, Princess Anne County, and how we came to be an independent city with no county. Homework consisted of things like marking all the important sites on a map and coloring images of historic houses and sites. We even took field trips to see the Norwegian Lady and the Thoroughgood House. This was in addition to learning about the settlers at Jamestown and the production of ham and peanuts, of course.


The Wikipedia article about Virginia Beach may as well be titled "History and Statistics of the Best City Ever."

(photos via Virginia Beach Public Library and About)

I don't know if schools across America are all like this, but Virginia Beach City Public Schools seem to be hell-bent on conditioning us to respond to certain situations in a very specific manner. The training began with fire drills as soon as you started school.

Firemen would come in and explain escape routes, how to determine if the fire is right outside the door, and that smoke rises so you should stay low to the ground. You would then practice going down the stairs (never the elevator) and heading out the nearest door. Sometimes it was awesome to get interrupted during a never-ending lecture; sometimes it was a pain in the ass to go out in the rain or cold. The most annoying part would definitely be the announcement afterward, telling us how slow we were to get out of the (not) burning building.

In middle school, we had tornado drills in addition to the usual fire drills. We would all go into a hallway and curl up fetal-style, head toward the wall. God forbid you start giggling about the fact that your ass was facing out, or else you'd be forced to run laps. Or maybe that was just how they rolled, KLMS-style.


Of course, the ultimate drill came in high school, when we began running terrorist drills. Okay, fine, so at first they were really more like school shooter drills, but you know what I mean. The alarm would go off, the teacher would turn off the lights and lock the door, and we'd huddle under our desks, wondering if a shooter would believe there would be an empty classroom in the middle of the day.


I'm not gonna lie - if I saw terrorists like this, I'd straight up jump out the window.

(photos via Danville, VA and Xinhua News Agency)

If you were in a Virginia Beach middle school, chances are that in the 6th and 7th grades you received a little flier about a Saturday Enrichment Program at TCC. I bet a ton of you saw something about classes on a Saturday and tossed that shit before your parents could get on it, but the nerdiest of the nerds (a.k.a. kids who were nerdy even among their KLMS peers) actually read the thing and thought, “ooo that sounds kind of interesting.”

You could choose one of three tracks: Physical Science, Science and Technology, and Biological and Chemical Sciences. You indicated your preferences and got entered into a lottery and, if you were lucky, you got put into the track you wanted along with all of your nerdy friends. I went both years, although I can't remember which programs I was in. I'm guessing I was in Physical Science one year and Science and Technology the other.

Things that I do remember, though mostly a little vaguely:

• learning AutoCAD, mostly using the keyboard / command line
  
• creating slideshows in AutoCAD using some very basic scripting
• doing some very, very primitive 3D rendering, also in AutoCAD
• being taught the importance of grounding yourself when working on computers
• attempting to memorize all the equations for conic sections
• being shown a disgusting black smoker lung (quite enough reason to be a non-smoker for life)
• going to the NOAA Chesapeake Bay headquarters and learning how to read weather maps
• measuring water depth and creating topographic maps of the river/bay bed
  
• testing water and netting sea life on a boat

Let's face it - those are some pretty complex topics for a bunch of 11 year olds. It was also a slap in the face when, 6 years later, I had to take Magnet Technology Foundations and was forced to sit through what appeared to be AutoCAD for Massive Idiots Who Don't Understand the Command Line. That doesn't mean my classmates were all massive idiots - it was just the way it was taught. If you know the class I am talking about, you know exactly what I mean.

Gratuitous picture so the post isn't all text:

In Chesapeake, once you were identified as a gifted fifth or sixth-grader, you were carted off to Indian River Middle School Annex once a week for GATE (Gifted and Talented Education). This is where you got to do things like design rollercoasters using ACAD...

...watch decade-old episodes of the Voyage of the Mimi starring a young Ben Affleck...

...learning about orienteering in the common area where the portables were...

...learn to count in Mayan...

...copy Alley Cat from your teacher's 5.25" floppy onto your hard disk...

...take field trips to the NATO headquarters...

...and make an Egyptian (death) mask out of papier mache.

Then at the end of the day, you all trooped back on the bus and went back to your home school to do times tables with the regular kids.

(Photos, from top: NewFreeDownloads.com, Entertainment Weekly, Berkshire Sport, Mexico Connect, Retro CPU, Julia Shea, DLTK)

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!

You know the deal: hands on the shoulders or waist, six inches apart. I don't think we ever actually had chaperones walking around with rulers, but I definitely heard talk of such things.
Inevitably, they wouldn't be able control us anymore and we'd end up like this (or worse):



Do you remember this dirty dancing anthem? I remember all of us tweens figuring out what it meant and giggling. Those are some risqué lyrics!



(I'll cite the images soon, I promise.)