Back in the old days before funding cuts for public schools, the school system of which I was part had a school-day program called Oxford Project Talent or OPT for short. Essentially, OPT was a program designed to give above average kids a chance to further their interests in topics related to math, science, art, history and technology. One day, near the end of my year in 3rd grade, the teacher distributed handouts to be taken home and given to our parents. As it turns out, these sheets were permission slips to allow us to be taken out of our regular classrooms and to attend the OPT meetings. I don’t remember how I felt about this opportunity at first. I tend to think I wasn’t very enthusiastic about getting involved in the program. After all, OPT was also affectionately known as “Oxford Potty Training” among the kids who weren’t involved in it. However, once I learned that my buddy Christian, who lived down the street from me and was a year older than I, was going, I think my feelings changed a little. So, my mom signed the permission slip and we attended a meeting with the program coordinator, Mr. Decesa (or something like that!) at the middle school to give the students and parents an idea of what was expected of us and what to expect.

It sounded like fun to me. Twice a week, we would leave our regular classrooms at the first bell and meet in the library where we would work on our research and projects and their associated reports. We would be expected to keep a journal and notes on all of our research. We would have full access to all of the books and materials in the library as well as access to the one computer that we had in the school. I thought this was a great opportunity! Being in 3rd grade, there were some books that we weren’t allowed to check out from the library until we were in 5th grade. These books for the “older kids” were tantalizing. In particular, there was a series of hardcover books related to World War II that I was dying to get my hands on! I’d have to come up with some project that would allow me to use them as resources!

When the first day of OPT in 4th grade finally came, I was excited. I talked with Mr. Decesa about what my first project would be. What was I interested in? During our summer vacation, I had seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and archaeology sure did look like an exciting field, so I decided that that would be my first area of research. I proceeded to check out a bunch of library books related to archaeology. I saw a lot of Egyptian, Aztec, Babalonian and Chinese artifacts and I was intrigued. At our next meeting, Mr. Decesa handed me a mimeographed page laying out topics that I should touch on and research that I should do. At the bottom of the page were several questions that I should answer about my topic of study. These questions weren’t the typical types of questions that I had encountered in my previous years of school. I couldn’t just answer these with a yes or no. Mr. Decesa was asking me to draw conclusions based on my research and to make statements about things I had never considered before.

Although my heart sank at the thought of real research, I got to work looking up the definitions of the twenty or so words that Mr. Decesa had typed at the top of the page. I remember the first few were “pot shard”, “midden heap” and “stratification”. Pretty big words for a 10 year old to deal with! Over the next several weeks, I learned a lot about the science and art of archaeology. I learned about the Greek and Roman empires, about some of the civilizations that came long before the Greeks and Romans, about medieval archaeology. I learned that Indiana Jones was probably not your typical archaeologist, but I learned about the tools of modern scientist and how they could be used to help date finds. It was an interesting time. I think that was also when I decided that I didn’t really want to be an archaeologist.

For the most part, I enjoyed OPT. I didn’t get picked on much. If someone told me I was in Oxford Potty Training, I told them that they were just jealous because I was smarter than they were – yeah I was a geek!

I moved on to other projects. I did research on computers and how they work (the first part of that project was learning binary math – that’s how I found out I didn’t want to be a mathematician!) and I learned that not everythinb about computers was as fun as playing with our Atari 2600. I read about astronomy and black holes. I did chemistry experiments with Christian and we made our own orange soda and played with little drops of mercury (before it was considered highly dangerous!). I learned about airplanes and aerodynamics.

I stayed in OPT the following year. My friend Stephen Robert joined us in 5th grade, so I did a couple of projects with him as well, although I can’t seem to remember much. I think we may have done a project on birds – he had a weird fascination with birds – especially the Scarlet tanager. Upon moving to 6th grade, which also meant moving to the middle school, Stephen and I were joined by my buddy Allen. Mr. Decesa left the program to start his own school for gifted children several towns away and Mrs. Ellia became the new director.

Funny story about Mrs. Ellia: She was a very large woman. One day we were sitting around in the OPT room doing whatever it was that we were supposed to be doing, when we heard a loud crash. Upon looking up, I was greeted with the shocking site of Mrs. Ellia sitting on the floor on top of her splintered and broken wooden chair. Apparently, there was some weakness in the chair that her weight had exploited and down she went. I remember laughing out loud as it happened. I felt just a little ashamed of myself after we learned that she had hurt her back in the fall.

Now fully entrenched in geekdom (I had begun playing D&D with my cousin and reading comic books over the summer), we worked on creating our own computer based Dungeons & Dragons role playing game. I had learned to write simeple programs in BASIC at computer camp over the summer, so I used my limited knowledge to write a game that let the user choose from a series of options, roll dice and fight monsters. There were A LOT of IF statements! We never really finished the game before Oxford Project Talent was cancelled. I don’t remember if it was discontinued due to a lack of interest by students or a lack of funding. So, it was back to regular classes for me. That was probably a good thing because it was about this time that school work was becoming a little more difficult. On top of that, our teenage minds were starting to wander to thoughts of the opposite sex leaving little room for further academic studies.