It's back-to-school season, and every newspaper, magazine, TV station, radio station and even movie theater has their own way of celebrating the incarceration of our youth for yet another year.

Did I say incarceration? I meant indoctrination.

For some reason, this year's theme seems to be "what the hell's wrong with the gifted kids?" The New Yorker ran an article on "geek camp," places where super-earnest adults try to convince smart kids to spend all their time on academic pursuits so that they'll end up hyper-motivated geniuses rather than goofball burnouts.

Our local schools here in my little corner of the New South are concerned that their own gifted populations (which they define as the top 20 percent or so of all students) aren't "achieving" on their tests nearly as well as the "non-gifted" set.

This isn't to say that the "gifted" kids are doing badly; they just aren't improving as much as their "non-gifted" cohort. Some of this is simple statistics: Once you're at the top, there's less room to move up. Durham's top elementary school in terms of testing (95 percent of kids at or above grade level) has been given a failing designation, mostly because it didn't improve enough. Excessive use of statistics to evaluate schools will utterly fuck education. You can quote me on that.

This whole gifted thing is one hell of a racket. In fourth grade, I was designated as gifted--in music. Now I'm pretty fast with figures (if pushed, I could calculate 324x457 in less than five seconds), and I assimilate and process information much faster than most folks. Which means that I can read the Sunday New York Times in about 15 minutes--if I don't feel like dawdling. That's cool, I suppose. But talent in music? Um, no. There's a reason I'm a music critic: I can't play any instrument well. I've tried a lot of them--and I can make rudimentary noises (say, a C scale) on a number of brass and woodwind instruments. But eight years of squeaking on the clarinet meant that I could, well, squeak on a clarinet. And I spent five years in piano lessons without ever learning to play with both hands at once. That's not mediocre. That's pitiful.

Nonetheless, the folks who knew better threw me into this "gifted" music program. We got to listen to a hippie chick (it was 1978 in Lawrence, Kan., after all) sing a folk song about a moth in her car. She called the moth a "miller," and then ruminated on the idea of baking brownies. (Extra special brownies? You make the call.) Then we had to write our own songs. We sung them into a tape player and then she transcribed them into sheet music for us. I wrote something called "Monsters Are Coming" and dutifully sang it into the tape recorder. She came back with notation for a "chant" (nice white folks in the middle of Kansas didn't know shit about rap music back in 1978), since she couldn't discern any notes to my "singing." I didn't argue much. I couldn't sing. I had no idea what I was doing in a music program in the first place.

Later that year, we got to make projects of some sort. I can't remember what mine was (I have this notion that I never actually completed whatever it was I was doing), but some friends of mine created a football quiz. That is, they thought up ten football trivia questions (What number does Roger Staubach wear? What number does Terry Bradshaw wear? The answer to every single question was #12.). They didn't think this was some silly joke. They were very serious about their football, and it just didn't occur to them that all of their QB heroes wore the same number.

After fourth grade, my family moved to Kansas City, but the programs weren't any better. I can't remember exactly what we did in fifth or sixth grade, but in the seventh grade we got to take a lot of field trips. I'm a big fan of field trips, but they didn't do anything other than get me out of class. That's cool and all, but not exactly stimulating.

Now, I'm sure that gifted programs these days are much better than the ones I encountered, but even so, it seems to me that the best way to handle truly "gifted" students would be to give them one directed-study class per semester. They'd have one hour each day to work on some project that interested them--be it in music, theater, math, you name it. The grade would be given based on the amount of work put into the project, not the actual result. After all, a lot of research and experimentation ends up in the crapper. But failure is generally more enlightening than success, and we ought to encourage kids to take chances. Still, if the kid in question jerks off for a semester, he or she oughta get an F. Give precious Penny a wake-up call.

I don't know what everyone's so worried about. The notion that there's one program that would work well for every student--gifted or otherwise--is absurd. It's like the phonics vs. whole language debate. The answer is both.

But you know, I'm not entirely happy with my proposed program. So what if a few of us "gifted" kids get "lost" along the way. You never know. We might spend our entire lives wandering around before discovering something truly useful. Or we might just piss it all away and go brew beer in the south of England. Worse things could happen.

Jon Worley skipped second grade. He understands that sort of thing just isn't done these days.