Third grade social studies
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)
Gifted education, Chesapeake-style
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...
(not a rollercoaster)...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...
(this photograph is factually accurate because about half of us were Asian)...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.
(I didn't think this was morbid at the time)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)
Virtual Reality at Nauticus
Nauticus is little more than a glorified Navy recruitment center for the pre-teen set, but we all took a field trip there in the year 1995 nonetheless. (Bonus: lunch at Waterside!) Supposedly Nauticus was the home of the world's first group virtual reality experience, but I sort of feel like Questor was a group virtual reality experience, wasn't it?
Anyway, Nauticus pretty much had only three attractions.
1) The People Mover. This was basically a conveyor belt that you stood on, and it became less exciting once you had traveled to an airport larger than the one in Norfolk, where they are quite common, and a LOT less exciting once they actually installed one at Norfolk "International" Airport.
2) The dog tag kiosk. Is it just me or was it kind of creepy for prepubescent kids to be wearing metal identification tags that exist solely to identify your body in the event the rest of you is charred to a crisp? Plus, they kind of made you look like a tool. The only famous people who wore dog tags were those bitches from Top Gun, and we all know what happened to the careers of Val Kilmer, Tom Cruise, Guy Who Died When His Ejector Malfunctioned. Leave the dog tags to those who actually need them.
3) Virtual reality. Everyone I knew skipped the actual education parts of Nauticus to secure a spot in the virtual reality line. I can't seem to find any information about it on the official Nauticus website. Perhaps they took it down because they realized that sending kids on a virtual mission to save the Loch Ness Monster's eggs is a shitty, shitty way to get them interested in maritime sciences and technology, seeing as how Loch Ness is a LAKE and the Loch Ness Monster is IMAGINARY.
I'm sorry, I take that last one back. Plesiosaurs are real.