I am, in some ways, a veritable font of useless information

[conuly]

(It really runs in the family. We used to ask each other national and state capitals at dinner. That is nowhere near as useful as you would think.)

I can't even go on game shows and make lots of money because the "easy" questions are all pop culture trivia and stuff, things which I do *not* know much about. Absolutely useless.

Even watching those shows annoys me. My grandmother has a fondness for Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader, the very concept of which offends me. Last episode I saw part of, one of the questions was about how many sides the state of Utah has. My response ran like this:

1. Six, duh.
2. How do I even know that? When is this EVER going to come up except on stupid shows like this?
3. He's going to get it wrong, though. He's going to think it's four.

And in fact, he did think it's four. He knew that if you can count the sides it must be one of those weird square-shaped states, and didn't stop to think that that'd be too easy and it must be something else. (I didn't either. Somehow, I really knew it was six. This is about as useful as knowing that Lucy is the saint with the eyeballs on a plate.)

The real question here is what state expects 5th graders to fill up their minds with this useless, useless trivia? It is, in a word, trivial. There is no use to knowing this at all. I can think of literally hundreds of facts about Utah more worth knowing (not that I know them all), and at any rate, if you really are beset by an urgent desire to know the shape of any state, you can always google it, pull out an atlas or globe or, as Pippi suggests, go write to them directly and ask!

But then again, some of the useless stuff I know comes in handy. Oh, I can't ever imagine needing to picture the exact perimeter of Utah in my head, it's not like I'm about to fence the place off, but there are other facts in there. A while back Ana was bemoaning her imagined lack of art skills (she's a bit melodramatic about it. There is no way she's the worst draw-er in the class, and anyway, she's young, she's not supposed to be good at drawing yet!) and I was able to tell her all about how Where the Wild Things Are was originally supposed to be about horses. But Maurice Sendak apparently can't draw horses for shit, so he trashed the whole thing and made them into strangely formed monsters instead.

I would never have pictured that little anecdote having any purpose, but there it is.

Now, if only I could find a reason to know Utah has six sides, I could die happy. My god, what a terrible waste of time for students, memorizing worthless factoids like that. Of all the stupid things....

Comments

[redbird]

You're right about kinds of random facts: a bunch of stuff about the Great Salt Lake is worth knowing. The Mormon history. Deserts. Railroads. Even Spiral Jetty, and the way it vanished from sight and then reappeared (which is part of the Great Salt Lake thing).

I do think that a certain amount of geography is useful and important, but it's not "how many sides does Utah have?" Even memorizing state capitals is more useful than that. And yes, having an idea that London is the capital of England, not the other way around, and India is in Asia. It's things like knowing that a chunk of the United States is desert, or how much of Earth is the Pacific Ocean.

I did once sit down with my nephew and do some remedial Canadian geography, a year or two after he'd moved to that country: it seemed he should know that B.C. is on the Pacific and Alberta east of it, not the other way around. But that was partly that since he was going to be Canadian, it seemed useful, and partly that he might be quizzed on it at school. And then we did some non-Canadian geography.

[steorra]

This sounds rather familiar; I think I have a lot of useless information too. We played geography games at dinner - often with the assistance of a world map table cloth. And I'm totally clueless about pop culture type stuff, with the same results for game shows; I enjoy watching Jeopardy (on the rare occasions when it's on around me) for the non-pop-culture questions, but I'd never be able to be a contestant.

I think it's not entirely unrelated to the fact that I'm an inefficient researcher. I tend to end up reading a bunch of stuff that's rather tangential to what I'm really trying to work on, and in the short run this makes me an inefficient researcher, but in the long run it means I know a bunch of stuff that's interesting and may in fact turn out useful for other research projects. (Though obviously in that case it's not useless information.)

[marveen.livejournal.com]

My thought process was exactly the same! (Six, duh.)

Which state is Yellowstone Park in? (As I recall, the contestant missed that one too.

I played with a states-map jigsaw as a child and State Tag on the playground.

State Tag: Paint an outline map of the US, unlabelled, on the playground asphalt. "It" calls out a state to be "home" and everyone runs to get a foot on it before It catches them. (Really helps the geography--I can still sketch the shapes of the states from memory, although I never did get the capitols down....for some reason our school didn't bear down on them.)

[conuly]

Ooh, like that map game in Carmen Sandiego, but with more tag!

[conuly]

Also, Yellowstone is in Wyoming. I totally did not just google that to make sure. Really!

Gotcha!

[marveen.livejournal.com]

It's a trick question--Yellowstone is MOSTLY in Wyoming, but pieces of it are in Idaho and Montana also.

Like I said, the contestant got it wrong as well. Nobody ever remembers the thin slices in MT and ID.

Re: Gotcha!

[conuly]

Well, I did in fact google it, so actually I knew that, but if they asked for the state and meant three states then I'd call that an unfair trick question.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

At least, the sides of a state, like a clavicle, remain the same. What bugged me in fifth grade was having to memorize things like the principal exports of Costa Nostra Macho, when even I knew by the time I was old enough to vote or invest or anything, they would probably be something different.

[conuly]

Memorizing the exact boundaries on a map. If the 90s taught us anything, it should be that such a task is futile, at best.

If you can roughly identify the area of a given country, and point to the largest/most important, and identify the major mountains and rivers (or, at least, the general area they're in), you're pretty much set. There's a reason we label maps, after all.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Well, I thought of saying "a US state"....

[conuly]

And yet, inside states, the county boundaries are always moving around.

But I see what you mean, yes :)

[rainbow-goddess.livejournal.com]

I know pop culture, except that the pop culture that I know is from approximately 20 to 30 years ago when I actually followed pop culture and "pop culture" didn't refer to "really bad reality shows."

Friends have said I should go on Jeopardy, but with my luck they'd hit me with questions about U.S. history and geography and I'd be lost. Also, my reflexes aren't good enough to hit the buzzer quickly.

[ncp.livejournal.com]

I didn't know that off the top of my head, but I did pull up a mental image, count the sides, and answer "six" before I finished reading the sentence.

[chaos-by-design.livejournal.com]

I have the kind of mind that just absorbs and retains knowledge without me having to try too hard. So I too have a lot of "useless" knowledge in my head. I find though that while the individual facts might not be very useful, having so many different points of reference is.

And then, sometimes I get to unload it on someone en masse, like when I was able to explain to a co-worker Nixon's Southern strategy, because I had read about it on Wikipedia. She was impressed.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I'm bad at geography. But the only time this really harmed me was when I was substitute teaching. I needed to clean up the room, and a jigsaw of the US with each state as a piece had been taken apart and not put together. So, I had to solve it before I could leave for the day. It took me longer than it would had I been good at geography or had a map handy, but it wasn't too bad.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I would expect a random fifth grader to know how many sides Utah has, but I'd expect them to think of the silhouette and count rather than instant-knowing it.

One of the early-elementary worksheets I've helped a student with was a match-the-outline state thing. Useful to keep the student busy, infuriating because they were broken up by category and Colorado and Wyoming were on the same sheet. And both Dakotas on another, along with Kansas I think. These are not distinctive states.

[marveen.livejournal.com]

Colorado's wider than Wyoming, and Kansas is wider than the Dakotas.

(Yes, I knew that off the top of my head.)

I always wondered why the Eastern states were so, well, squiggly, while the Midwest onward the state lines marched like graph paper....slightly randomized graph paper with rivers crossing it occasionally, but mostly straight lines.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

They were presented without a consistent scale and in isolation, no border states or anything. Bothered me a lot.

I was taught that the Old Northwest, which is most of the current Midwest, was originally meant to be something like twenty states, all small. You can see the surveyors' exhaustion with the big square ones. When you have a dozen groups coming in with different ideas and history and lots of geography to set as boundaries, you get little squigglies. When you realize there's an entire half-continent to divvy up, you start looking at latitude and longitude very seriously.