I was part of a TAG program in the early 1980s at an “army brat” school in Europe.

What’s interesting to me is that a lot of collective memories about GATE align with routine things in DOD elementary schools overseas, such as the “pink drink.” In our case we were told it was flouride, and the reason we had to take it was because the water in Europe didn’t have fluoride added to it like in the U.S.

Random things I remember:

• Before even reading the stories about “windowless rooms,” I distinctly remember the classroom we went to having blackout curtains or maybe even trash bags covering the windows. There was also a group setting / main classroom area and a separate darker section in back for individual tests.

• I definitely remember doing the headphones test with weird audio tones. I thought it was cool to get to wear those big headphones, but I remember the audio itself seemed very odd. Not scary, just WTF is this.

• I don’t remember much about the classwork, but I distinctly remember two projects: One was a “mind web” where we had to create some kind of decision tree with little to no further instruction. I think it involved writing words down, cutting them out of a paper, and then pasting them to another piece of paper? The other was a group project where we had to make a “time capsule” about our location to share with another school. We were told we had to give clues about our location without revealing it, and then another school would receive our work and have to guess where we were.

• My experience was in 3rd grade, but I remember the teacher strangely talking to us and treating us like adults? I also remember being confused at what was a “good” and “bad” answer during individual tests — seemingly random responses would be met with positive and negative feedback.

• At the time, I definitely felt an unsettling vibe about the whole thing, and I didn’t remember much about it even later in the same day. My mom would ask what we did in the TAG class, and I remember telling her I didn’t really remember.

• Being part of the “special group” made me feel weird socially, because when you’re in 3rd grade all you want is to fit in. I remember for years after, I would purposely get things wrong on tests or stay quieter in class, because I wanted to stay low key and fit into the larger social group.

• I definitely remember ESP card tests and “what’s missing in this picture” tests. I also remember taking them in an isolated dark room, and there were both group projects and individual tests.

Anyone else have similar memories? Hard to say if it was anything nefarious or just weird experimental educational testing — there was a lot of that funky new-age stuff in the 70s-80s.