Things Not to Ask of Jesus

A few years ago my son, Aidan, was taking religious education classes. One day he returned from catechism telling me that his instructor, a young woman in her twenties, accidently dropped her phone in the toilet. She retrieved it quickly, but it was completely submerged in the loo so it was unlikely that it would still function properly. Aidan told me that she said a prayer to Jesus, and the phone worked just fine afterwards.

One time I was watching a television documentary about kids getting ready for college. Several Christians were all about to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). They formed a circle and asked Jesus to help them with the exam "especially the math."

I had a colleague once who was quite religious. He told me that he said a prayer before a blind date "to ensure things went well." He also prayed before job interviews for the similar reasons.

This got me thinking about what it must be like for Jesus to hear prayers. I don't think He really cares all that much about your cell phone which you carelessly dropped into the toilet no matter how sincerely you pray. I wouldn't bother Him about a test either. Best to just study up. And praying for a date to go well is just plain wrong. What did that sound like,

"Jesus, please make sure that my blind date has a nice rack."

Or praying for an advantage on a job interview,

"Jesus, please give the other candidates the Nutella squirts."

Gold Rush

I saw something like this unfold while watching the History Channel's smash reality hit, Gold Rush. That's the show whereby a bunch of gruff moderately skilled dude bros spend their summers up in the Yukon washing dirt and rocks to capture a cup of gold. Jack Hoffman, the patriarch of 316 Mining, prays for success at finding gold all the time. He exclaims,

"Heavenly Father, we ask that you richly bless us with gold."

I don't think this is a good idea. He doesn't ask that no one falls into the grizzly bars or gets sucked into the tromel. He doesn't ask Jesus to look after their families in their absence. He asks for money. He might as well ask Jesus for a winning lottery ticket. You have to remember that these guys are all religious folks so they know the story. No matter what you believe in, historically speaking, Jesus had a pretty rough time when he was down here. I wouldn't be asking Him for coin especially when there are other people who are in real need of help queuing up as well.

Carrie Underwood has a song on her debut album, Some Hearts. It's a ballad that tells the story of a young distracted mom who's speeding to her mother's house on Christmas Eve when she hits a patch of black ice and loses control of her vehicle. Her small child is strapped in the back seat. As the car spins out of control the woman throws her hands in the air and cries,


Carrie Underwood

"Jesus, take the wheel!"

While I know this is a reference to letting the Almighty take control of your life in this particular situation it would have been best if she kept her hands on the steering wheel and turned into the skid, that is, spin the wheel in the same direction in which the back of the car is moving. She made it out okay but not from her superior driving skills. It just doesn't seem right to ask the Savior to drive your car for you.

Religious folk ask Jesus for everything all the time as if He's got nothing better to do but answer their lame ass prayers. I grew up Catholic so my religious education was liberally seasoned with a good amount of guilt, and it appears to have worked. I rarely ask Jesus for anything. In fact, I often thank Him for things that went well in my life as in,

"Dear Jesus, I don't need anything right now. I just wanted to say thank you for that awesome wave I just rode all the way into the shore."

Or sometimes I thank him for not getting run over while I ride my bike on my daily loop. You should try it once in a while. You know, thank the Man for another day on earth. After all He's dealing with millions of knuckleheads asking Him to be their copilot. Who knows? You just might make Him smile, and how cool would that be?

Editor's Note: Originally posted on March 30, 2017.

Scholastic Asinine Test

 

Back in the early 80's, I was getting ready to apply to colleges. I played a sport, logged some community service and, of course, I got good grades. Every college bound hopeful soldiered through the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT for short. An important metric even today, the exam is taken by students as a practice test in ninth grade often followed by two additional attempts at the real thing.

Back then, there were no prep classes offered in high school. As the youngest baby boomer, the generation millennials often accuse of stealing their jobs and opportunities, I had to take the SAT straight up in a not so safe space without extra time allotted for an inability to sit still. I might not have had to walk to school barefoot in the snow, but when it came to college admissions, I was on my own.
 
One math problem I had on the SAT puzzled me for years until I recently looked up the answer. It was as follows. Given the angle, what is the value of theta?


Bullshit Math Problem

 The four possible answers were,
 
          A) 150°
          B) 30°
          C) 135°
          D) 90°

The issue here is that the 90° in the graph is clearly wrong. It looks more like 45°. Faced with this on the test, I wasn't sure what to do. I threw out "A" and "B" as they didn't make any sense, but do you ignore the data in favor of the plot or do you take the given number as gospel? I finally settled on this approach,

Go with what it really is.

This meant that I would ignore the 90° on the graph and pick the supplement to 45°, that is, C) 135°. The correct answer is D) 90°. According to the authors of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, one should ignore reality in favor of bogus data. Back when I took the test, word analogies in the English section were commonplace. Those were questions that read like this,

Planet is to ball as _______ is to _______.

The answer is something like "dice : box" except the actual test questions weren't that easy, and there were a lot of them too. The test was more like this,

ABSTRUSE : ALLOGAMY ::

A) alysm : crepuscular
B) lucubration : zeugma
C) persiflage : panglossian
D) levament : mytacism

I didn't know what the first two words meant, let alone any of the answers. Unless you read a lot of books or Latin was your first language, you hadn't a prayer of answering these questions. This all changed in 2005 when it was determined that word analogies were biased towards certain socioeconomic groups. The question identified as advantageous to coastal elites was,

RUNNER : MARATHON ::

A) envoy : embassy
B) martyr : massacre
C) oarsman : regatta
D) referee : tournament
E) horse : stable

The correct answer is "C" but unless you wear oxfords, salmon shorts and Jesus sandals, it looks like it will be Two Rivers Community college for you. I didn't do well on the verbal reasoning section that was later renamed "critical reading." You had to read several paragraphs about volcanoes or something, then answer questions like,

Which choice best defines the main purpose of this article?

All four possible answers would appear in the text. Not knowing how to approach these problems, I would number the answers in the order that they appeared in the passage, then I would discard the middle two, and select either the first or last whichever seemed best. I later learned that this was completely wrong. A complicated technique described to me by a college admissions advisor involved looking at each paragraph for synonyms used in the answers to narrow it down without reading the entire passage. She explained that doing well on the SAT is about time management so you have to arrive at the answer quickly by skimming for clues.

Today, there are many guides that students may purchase which will teach them how to improve their SAT scores. Additionally, if you come from money, you can hire a tutor who specializes in SAT preparedness. Even though a stellar score will help get you into an elite academic institution, it's widely accepted that it isn't a measure of how well you will do in college. How much effort you are willing to put into something is not determined by an aptitude test, the score for which today seems more connected to your parent's income than a student's ability. Then again, if your parents are rich, you could always have them stroke a check to a real estate holding company after which a coach will put you on the roster of the lacrosse team to justify the athletic scholarship the exclusive school will offer you. You won't even have to go to any practices or play in any games. That seems way easier and certainly less work on your part.

In 2011, I saw the movie Moneyball which was about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and how the general manger, Billy Beane, assembled a bunch of undervalued players. Beane hired a Harvard educated computer analyst, Paul DePodesta, who had no baseball analysis experience but theorized that the existing method of evaluating athletes which included factoring in the number of seasonal errors for each player was inadequate and misleading. DePodesta argued that the way to win at baseball was to get on base and not by worrying about how many times a player dropped the ball. So to in academics, optimizing on a student's performance on a standardized test is the wrong metric to assess suitability for higher education and as such is not a predictor of performance.

Now, if I had read the book by Michael Lewis on which Moneyball was based, I would've known that "mytacism" means an excessive or incorrect use of the sound of the letter "m" and that "persiflage" is light and slightly contemptuous mockery or banter.

I should have read more as a kid.