Same, only I rocked up into that about six, seven years later.

>In hindsight it's clear that no one really knew what the goal
>was, the department just had a mandate from the state Department of
>Education to Do Something for the kids at the right-hand end of the
>bell curve, and Quest was it.

Do you know, I have talked to a lot of people who were int Gifted and Talented (before they realized that as a pedagogical decision those programs were... flawed, and moved on to other things) and no two people have the same story about what the hell their school district was up to with it. They're all WIDELY variable.

That's weird. Most other things, there's some commonality. You get the same stories about gym class, or history class, or whatnot, from Maine to San Diego. Sure, maybe there's some local color, or some race/class stuff going on (kids from poor urban schools will have different stories than kids from poor rural schools will have different stories than kids from rich suburban schools will have different stories than the only black kid from a rich suburban school, etc.) but there's an enormous amount of commonality among most kids of the same age cohort re: the American public school system.

Not with the old G&T stuff, tho. Everyone has a SUPER DIFFERENT story. Those charged with educating us really were throwing whatever they had against the wall and seeing what stuck, weren't they?

>(It's probably just as well we didn't know that at the time; I'm more
>tolerant of that sort of thing now that I'm an adult with
>mild-to-moderate imposter syndrome than I was as an elementary school
>student. After all, Dunning-Kruger is just imposter syndrome that
>came up tails instead of heads.)

The new version of "imagine everyone in the room naked" is "imagine that everyone is just as afflicted with imposter syndrome as you are."

I'm only like... 25% joking.

> Imagine trying to read your favorite novel,
>only to discover that it is not really that novel, plus it has
>Discussion Questions in boxes scattered around and an essay at the end
>of each chapter in which you are encouraged to Further Deconstruct
>What You Have Just Read.
>
>(I can already hear Merc saying "Oh yes please!" but some of us were
>not that into deconstruction in the third grade, I'm just putting it
>out there. :)

This actually sounds legitimately terrible, and a great way to put kids off reading. And that's hard, because most kids fuckin' love to read. They might not necessarily want to read what's set in front of them by the people trying to hammer them against the anvil of formal education in such a way as to produce a solid citizen at the end of the process, tho.

Deconstruction is a powerful tool, but it's just that, a tool. You wouldn't hand a kid a hammer and tell them to buck wild with it; they'd hurt themselves or others. You teach'em what the hammer is for before doing that.

Lobotomizing classics of western literature, and then taking that lobotomization and trying to chop it apart into something kids are then meant to apply their intellects to productively sounds... really awful. Like, that's one of the cardinal sins of education: missing the forest for the trees. It's looking at the sort of thing that highly motivated people who are passionate about the subject matter (or at least passionate about getting full course credit) are doing in post-secondary education and trying to apply the form but not the substance of it to kids in primary school.

This is not effective pedagogy.

>For all I know, this would probably be almost tragically
>mainstream nowadays,

Doing it as part of course curriculum would still be regarded as rather outre, the sort of thing that extremely progressive/experimental schools would do.

But having it sanctioned by the school in some way isn't. My high school has an RPG club that's a shade over twenty years old. Gets a picture in the yearbook with all the other clubs and everything.

>For one thing, Basic Set only has three alignments,
>and from the context given in the descriptions, they're obviously
>good, neutral, and evil, although the designers copped out and called
>them Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic (because as we all know,
>lawful people are automatically kind, honest, and unselfish as well,
>and vice versa).

The story I have heard is that this isn't so much a copout as it is trying to cram a square peg into a round hole.

The original law/chaos axis is supposedly based on the idea of a morally neutral tension between Law and Chaos in the cosmology of Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone novels. (Which, by the way, have NOT aged well. Moorcock is a talented writer but great googly moogly the Elric books are extremely 70s and not in a good way.) This is why the good/evil axis exists alongside it.

They apparently wanted to keep the idea of the law/chaos cosmology around, but also didn't want the full three-by-three grid. Because it was too complicated? So they just... folded everything together.

>For another, the classes and non-human races are
>interconnected, so that, for example, all elves are multiclass
>fighter/magic-users.

This completely baffled me the first time I had it explained to me by a friend before another friend interjected in a way that made it clear:

"You didn't play a Fighter, or a Mage, or a Cleric, or anything like that. You played an Elf. Your class is Elf. The Dwarf's class is Dwarf. You didn't gain levels in Fighter or Mage. You gained levels in Elf. Humans have a race AND a class. You just have a class."

Conceptualizing it that way made it make a lot more sense.

>Obviously, she controlled what we had in our inventories, too. You
>know those laughable suggested starting equipment lists in the
>Player's Handbook? The ones that always include a 10-foot pole
>and 50 feet of rope? (Do they still have those in the newer
>editions?)

They do, but it's much saner.

F'rinstance... lemme crack open my 5e PHB to a random spot in class choices.

Okay, Rogues. Here's what a Rogue starts with:

• A rapier OR a shortsword
  
• A shortbow and a quiver of twenty arrows OR a shortsword
  
• A burglar's pack OR a dungeoneers pack OR an explorers pack
  
• Leather armor, two daggers, and thieves' tools.
  

What's in the various packs, and the thieves' tools, is detailed in the equipment section elsewhere in the book, but it's basically a bunch of general-use stuff for the stated purpose. And yes, rope is among them. A dungeoneer, explorer, or burglar probably could use about fifty feet of rope.

Other classes get different options but it all makes sense. Like.. the Burglar's Pack contains a thousand ball bearings. You, personally, might not ever use them... but you can certainly conceive of why a pack of general-purpose burglar's tools would have ball bearings.

> and the guy sitting next to me
>rummaged around in his bag and came up with one of the licensed
>D&D novels to pass the time. (I have no memory of which one.
>There can't have been all that many of them in 1987, can there?)

This would almost certainly have had to have been a Dragonlance novel, of which there were ten in publication by the end of 1987. There is a small, outside chance it was one of the two Greyhawk novels, or the single Forgotten Realms novel, available at the time, but weight of probability says Dragonlance.

(There was a time in my life when I thought Tanis Half-Elven was maybe the coolest guy in the world. To my credit, I have never, ever thought that about Drizz't Do'Urden.)

-Merc
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