I like to think of myself as being reasonably well-educated, both in the academic and street smart sense. I know enough to impress or irritate other people in a bar where everyone is shouting out answers at the TV during Jeopardy by framing my answer as a question and quietly saying, "Who is Nobel?" before Alex Trebek has finished reading his answer about Swedish inventors.

I'd love to be a contestant on Jeopardy or Millionaire, and on any given night I think I'd have an even chance of winning, as long as the categories ranged in my wheelhouse of general knowledge. For instance, I could tell you that the indentation on your upper lip under your nose is called a philtrum and that the metal part of a knife inside the handle is called a tang and that Babe Ruth's lifetime batting average is .342.

The need for such information doesn't come up in real life often, if ever, but there it is stored away in some part of my brain along with seldom sung lyrics of bawdy rugby songs. I make room for all this useless information by instantly forgetting what I wrote about last week or the names of people I just met.

One thing I am sure of is that I could mop the floor with any ten-year-old contestant in the new hit TV game show Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?. I take that back. I could compete with a ten-year-old contestant, and I could mop the floor with most adult contestants. Why? Well, believe it or not, I actually remember most of what I learned in fifth grade (Shout out to Sister Ann Miriam at St. Margaret's.) When I was in fifth grade, tin was the answer to any question involving Bolivia and South America had lakes with unforgettable names like Maracaibo and Titicaca.

In those days, DeSoto was the name of a car, as well as an explorer, Balboa was a Spanish Conquistador and not a five-sequel movie boxer nicknamed the Italian Stallion, and DeLeon was famous for discovering Florida while looking for something else, even though I knew him best as my amazingly youthful Uncle Ponce. OK, maybe I had reasons for remembering fifth grade.

What surprises me are the number of adults who have no clue and trumpet it. In a story Saturday about the new game show's phenomenal success, Associated Press reporter David Bauder felt unmanned by a fifth grader who knew that a trapezoid has four sides. "Trapezoid," Bauder wrote. "Whats a trapezoid?" I teach English and journalism at a local college, which shall remain nameless so as not to embarrass the college or my students, because I gave my English Composition students a ten question quiz from questions on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? and my college students weren't. Only two out of twelve of them passed, barely, with seven correct. Most scored five or fewer correct. Questions like, "true or false, the word 'easily' is an example of an adjective." Frankly, (that's an adverb) I was stunned. And the students seemed more pleased by what they answered correctly, than the awful truth that they just flunked fifth grade.