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(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....
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....
