As soon as the secretary came on the intercom to make the announcement at 1:45 on Fridays, I wanted to hide my head.
Would the Mentally Gifted Minors please come to the auditorium now?
Someone at Yorba Elementary School in the early 1970s decided that Mentally Gifted Minors (or MGM for short) would be a great name for the group of kids whose IQ test scores qualified them for the gifted program. (Actually, after writing the first draft of this, I found this was a California-wide decision. Ack.)
They could’ve said, “Will everyone in MGM come to the auditorium?” But no. They made the secretary say, every week at the same time: “Will the Mentally Gifted Minors come to the auditorium?”
What in the ever-living hell? As you can imagine, I received sneers and stares every time this happened. I wanted to crawl into a hole.
This weekly embarrassment would have melted away if going to Mentally Gifted Minors had been a gift afterwards. Sadly, it was a bit of a miss. One year, we learned sign language in MGM, which I loved. One year, I remember spending a lot of time with maps in another. But when I was in the second grade, the only activity for the MGM kids was capturing butterflies and pinning them to a board.
I don’t remember the face of that teacher, since she scared me. Now that I think about it, I realize how angry I was that our time out of class was spent with butterfly nets in the field next door to the school. (This was southern California in the 1970s. We weren’t gamboling through fields of sunflowers in Provence.) Our job was to hunt for any butterflies and capture them in a net.
If we caught one, we had to close the net by choking off the top of it with our hands, bringing the butterflies to the auditorium, then waiting in line. The fluttering wings batted against our hands through the nets, until it was our turn to have our teacher grab the butterfly.
She asked us to hold a long pin with a little colored ball at the end while she placed the butterfly against a corkboard. Then, she required us to stick the butterfly to a board. Each butterfly flapped its wings, desperately. Eventually, the flapping slowed, then stopped. It was our job to watch this, then press our fingers against the wings until they rested against the board.
By the end of the year, her boards had hundreds and hundreds of butterflies, dead and fading, in neat lines.
I have literally no idea why we were asked to do this in our Mentally Gifted Minors program. It’s also entirely possible that we didn’t do this all year long. Maybe we worked on pinning butterflies for a week.? A month? I do remember going out to the field multiple times with a net, then wandering. There weren’t any grades in MGM. I’m pretty sure after the first time I never pinned another butterfly to a board again.
Whenever I think of the state of being stuck, I think of one of those butterflies, flapping wings in desperation, pinned to a board.
How can you tell when you’re stuck?
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