Carolyn Explains it All: Trivial pursuit is trivial

Last night, I posed the following question to my roommates: “Does it count as studying if my… Last night, I posed the following question to my roommates: “Does it count as studying if my textbook is open on my lap and I’m not reading it, but I’m watching reruns of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” on TV?”

“Of course!” they all agreed. Since I was still technically filling my head with information, I could definitely write the night off as a productive one. What a relief.

Unfortunately, though, it’s fairly obvious that we were all joking – there’s a big difference between trivia, which you learn from quiz shows, and knowledge, which you gain from textbooks. Everybody knows that, right?

Actually, I feel like some of my professors don’t.

Coming off a couple solid weeks from midterms, I’m becoming increasingly frustrated by some of the information I’m apparently required to spend valuable time studying. Too often, I’m coming across professors and classes that can’t – or don’t – differentiate between “fact” and “factoid.”

The occasional tidbit in an otherwise credible textbook reading is fine. I can appreciate Dr. Whasit’s attempts to spice it up, and more often than not, those tidbits are actually interesting for the moment.

But the humor is lost when I am required to spit these tidbits back on exams.

Here’s a brief refresher course, for anyone unsure, on midterm manners. Examples are very loosely based on actual test-taking experiences.

Things that are acceptable to require a student to know on an exam: the story of the Watergate scandal in a U.S. history class, the difference between conditional and discrete probabilities in a statistics class, the difference between passive and active voice in an English class.

Things that are not acceptable to require a student to know on an exam, or to remember at all, really: A cute song lyric that was played for fun once in class, the place of a birth of a mathematician who conducted a study with results relevant to what is being learned in class, the definition of “antidisestablishmentarianism.”

The latter paragraph consists of nothing but trivia. And while trivia (as well as knowledge) may get you far on the Game Show Network, there is no place for it in the classroom.

It really isn’t that hard to distinguish between the two categories. Understanding what’s going on in society today? That would be knowledge. Learning something that’s just kind of cool? That’s trivia.

This is not to say that information filed under “trivia” is always useless, or even that information filed under “knowledge” is always helpful. But I’m shelling out thousands of dollars to be here (out of state!). And I would like to acquire knowledge, which usually is helpful, over trivia, which usually isn’t. I don’t want to hurt trivia’s feelings or anything, but its applications on an intellectual level are limited.

If I wanted to learn only trivia, I would sit around and watch “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire” all day.

Let’s get serious. I do that anyway.

But I wouldn’t have to feel so guilty about it.

The purpose of college is to build life skills, ranging from laundry to organic chemistry. Awareness of the fact that bananas were officially introduced to the American public at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition simply does not qualify.

It’s one thing to mention that those finer points in a class lecture, but to demand that I dedicate the same kind of time to memorizing them as I would in learning the key elements of the Periodic Table in a chemistry class is, quite frankly, infuriating.

I’m aware that there’s something to be said about learning for the sake of learning. I promise, I’m always the first to Google things mentioned in conversation that I’m not familiar with, such as the 23rd Amendment (turns out it allows the District of Columbia to choose electors for president and vice president). I even read for fun.

I’m tempted to summarize my frustration by growling, “If one more professor asks me a trivial question on a midterm or exam, I’m gonna