Material That Won't Be on the Test

What's wrong with me?

You probably heard it a million times growing up, mostly from teachers. “Everything that’s going to be on the tests will be covered in the course work,” or some variant of that. As the 1970s turned into the 1980s, teachers became even more helpful. They’d give “hints” on the specific paragraphs, images, diagrams, formulae, algorithms, whatever, from which exam questions would be drawn. That was my experience, at least.

I did well on tests, but I retained the wrong stuff long term. While peers could state the most important, testable material years later, it sounded new to me. But I could recite from memory the stuff that wasn’t on the test. I had a weird knack for hanging on to the edge cases, the sidebars, the asides, and the footnotes.

Today, I realized that my . . . penchant? . . . for remember the trivia gave me an unfair advantage. I’m 60. If I’d realized this fact sooner, I could have made some hay with it. But, in hindsight, knowing the untestable (or untested) material helped even if I didn’t realize it at the time.

And it makes sense.

The testable material is what 99 percent of students focus on. They learn adaptations in learning and reading to skim (i.e., ignore) the stuff that won’t be tested and focus on the test material. They got As. But what happens when they leave the controlled, predictable world of academia and head out into the real world where there is no map, where the future is uncertain, and where the right answer can only be determined with time?

Well, the 99 percent all come up with the same answer to every situation. They come up with the testable answer because, duh, it was on the test. It must be the right answer.

And it was the right answer on Mr. Frein’s college credit European History final in 1982. That doesn’t help when you’re trying to figure out how to handle a dictator pope who love heretics, demon idols, and rapists more than he does Jesus Christ and the Church He founded. 48.97° North, 7.91° West was the correct answer to “What are the coordinates of the Maginot Line,” but it doesn’t tell you whether Ukraine, Russia, or, maybe, the United States blew up the children’s hospital today.

No. The answers to navigating our strange world of 2024 are far more likely to be buried in a footnote or scribbled in a margin than highlighted in fading fluorescent yellow for rapid recognition on a page in a textbook at the bottom of a UHaul book-moving box at the back of a 10x10 WeStoreIt unit in Ellisville, Missouri. The book you kept through the years because, “I loved that class, and I learned so much.”

Think about it: all the “right” answers are always the same, but they never give direction. The people with the not-so-right answers or bizarre answers or out-of-left-field answers are the people who actually forge new paths.

Elon Musk operated off the untested material. So did Steve Jobs. In a sense, so did Benny Siegel when he set off to create a resort mecca in the middle of the Nevada dessert. None of those guys put a lot of stock in the same answers everybody else gave. They gave the different answers, the answers they eventually got credit for after staying after school and arguing that, while the answer wasn’t what the teacher had listed as “acceptable” in the answer guide, it was technically not wrong.

There’s nothing wrong with studying the test answers instead of the subject, but you can’t really call that learning. Mortimer Adler believed that learning is not filling an empty brain with knowledge. To Adler, learning only happened when you displaced error with truth. The right answer on the final exam was as likely to be error as truth, but the student who worked only to get the answers right would never know.

What happens to that student, many years later, when facing a test that has no scoring rubric, no answer key, and no highlighted textbook pages to cram? Having learned only how to identify and memorize the acceptable answers, how does he navigate such an ambiguous and uncertain world?

Critical thinking, philosophical thinking, logic, and reason are tools that operate in the untestable material. Perhaps “untestable” is the wrong word. “Black and white” might be better. The answers to the more important questions are, in fact, testable, but not by a scoring matrix. Only time and the culmination of possibilities will determine whether we chose well or poorly on these existential questions. And I here argue that the students who skimmed the highlights and devoured the footnotes are more likely to choose well on such matters than the students who made a beeline to the “right” answers on tests.

Never has this difference been more starkly displayed than the Trump-Biden debate two weeks ago. Biden sounded like every politician I’ve ever heard speak. He “proved” his worth by citing legislation he’d supported or opposed as a Senator, vice president, and president. His assertions of support or opposition were accurate. He met the requirements of the scoring rubric. And he lost.

Trump has no legislative career to reference, no sponsored bills to wave before us, no “SB-437, a bill to restrict game fishing of endangered and threatened species on tributary rivers and streams of the upper Muckwok River.” Nope. Trump could only talk about results: great results from his administration and business career; vomit-inducing results from Biden’s life in Congress and the White House.

Eric Greitens talked about this dichotomy in his first book, The Heart and the Fist. Writing about a UN mission that did more harm than good to the kids it was intended to protect, he wrote:

Later, when I thought about the UN workers in Gasinci writing their letter, when I read about what had happened at Srebrenica, I realized that there was a great dividing line between all of the speeches, protests, feelings, empathy, good wishes, and words in the world, and the one thing that mattered most: protecting people through the use of force or threat of force. In situations like this, good intentions and heartfelt wishes were not enough. The great dividing line between words and results was courageous action.¹

The testable material was good intentions; the other stuff was courageous results.

Most of us didn’t learn this distinction in school, because the purpose of school is to get the hell out with least possible amount of hassle. Schools, at least of the last 50 years, don’t teach students how to think or how to choose, but how to anticipate test material. Some do that well, some poorly, but few if any teach anything else. It’s the kids are a little off who learn the other stuff. By successfully defending their not-wrong answers that lie beyond the scope of their teacher’s matrix, they learn reason and logic and persuasion. By getting a thrill out of stumping people with the untestable trivia that fills most of their textbooks and assigned readings, they learn to love the author and his craft more instead of memorizing the first paragraph of each section and first sentence of each paragraph. By spending more time with library books freely chosen than with the assigned material from class, they learn to appreciate knowledge and thought, not recite what the listener expects to hear.

And now we live in an epoch where the facts, the answer keys, and highlights are worse than useless; they’re dangerous. This world of today considers the highlighted answers learned before 2015 to be heretical and blasphemous and punishable by any means the world sees fit. You know what I’m talking about. Doctors who stated simple, memorized facts learned and prove in pre-med through daily practice were cancelled, not because the world suddenly embraced ambiguity and experimentation, but because the world had written and promulgated a new scoring matrix and woe be tide anyone who gave any other than the official, authoritative answer. “The unmasks kill grandmothers.” “The unvaccinated are mass murders.” “Six feet of separation.” “We will never shake hands again.” “Better dead than Covid.” “Safe and effective.” “The shot in pregnant women protects her unborn child.”

Yes, these were all lies, untruths, and idiotic, but they were (and, in many cases, are) the required answers. And most people, having been through an educational career in which there was no right or wrong answers, only required answers, immediately reverted back to 7th grade or junior year, to their “good student” years, the time when they stopped fighting for truth and started writing down the answer the teacher wanted to get an A and get the hell out of here.

“Just get the shot, Bill, so we can stop arguing about it,” my co-worker told me in September of 2021. “Everybody knows it’s bullshit, but we all got it so they can stop preaching about it and we can get on with our lives.”

How many projects started by corporations actually complete successfully was never on any test I took, but I know the answer. It was buried in a non-testable paragraph of a book I assigned in some class in business school. I got an A in that class (because I, too, decided it was time just write down the answer she wants and get the hell out of here), but I remember the footnotes better than the highlights. It was that piece of trivia—proven to be true through 30 years of work in software—that gave me confidence in announcing, in April 2020, that the vaccine project would fail. Regardless of the billions Pfizer and Moderna made, I was right. The project failed. The vaccines are neither safe nor effective, and everybody knows it. (But they will give the required answer when tested.)

As a Catholic, we are now told that the required answer is to do whatever the pope tells us and that to question that answer is to excommunicate oneself, being certainly and assuredly condemned to the fires of hell for all eternity. And the pope says a devout and boistrous bishop is schismatic and must be reviled. “Revile him or go directly to hell; do not pass Go; do not collect two hundred dollars.” Catholics, in particular those who went through eight, twelve, or (in my case) 16 years of Catholic education are bloody experts at learning the required answers and regurgitating them into the little blue book in a style and grammar the teacher prefers. I think we invented it. The pope and his henchmen expect it. It’s why they excommunicated Viganó.

Those of who read beyond the testable material, though, realize that we are not required agree with whatever the pope says, just as St. Paul was not required to agree with St. Peter’s errors. Some of us—the ones who color outside the lines and still listen to Harry Chapin—know that, when a highly placed and influential archbishop raises serious questions about the legitimacy of a pope, you don’t scream, “heretic,” you stop and pay attention. In the back of your mind, you know that Viganó is either right or wrong, and that, if wrong, in very deep and slippery chrism. (You also know that he knows that better than you.) But if he’s right, drastic measures must taken, and the sooner the better. When you read the footnotes and look up the references, you understand that Viganó did not obviously commit a black-or-white excommunicable sin, but he may have. But he did introduce, or reveal, an ambiguity that’s as big as the known universe. In fact, he exposed an infinity mirror of ambiguity that boggles the mind of someone (according to accepted, standardized behavioral science assessments) scores many standard deviations outside the normal range for “comfort with ambiguity.” Someone who would always take what’s behind Door Number 3 rather the brand new, 1973 Ford Maverick convertible. (Even though I suspect that what’s behind Door Number 3 is Jay Stewart² in a diaper tethering a goat.³)

Viganó has made us think, not regurgitate. The world hates to think, I know, but “if anyone loves the world,” as John 2:10 tells us, “love for the Father is not in him.” I say, to embrace thought, contemplation, is to embrace the Father. To embrace serious consideration is to the reject the world, or, at least, to ignore it. Or, at the very minimum, to recognize that the answers on its scoring key are bogus.) What Viganó has charged is that Jorge Bergoglio is not and never was pope because he was heretically opposed to what the Church definitively teaches.

The accusation, by a former senior Vatican official who personally knows the man he’s talking about, that the “pope” is not the “pope” demands serious damn thought. Viganó is not a lifelong sedevacantist, but the Papal Nuncio to the United States in the Obama administration and during Bergoglio’s pontificate. This is not a Catholic Twitter “influencer.” He was fully onboard the Vatican train until he witnessed Bergoglio restore McCarrick—the child-molester Viganó helped expose. The shock led him to serious contemplation on the state of the Church, specifically the Vatican. He studied hard and came up with a very disturbing conclusion.

While the Vatican attempted to solve the matter by kicking him out, the matter is the matter and must resolved. To the laity who read it open-mindedly, the arguments in Viganó’s accusation are pretty convincing—at least, convincing enough to take a deeper look. And the import, the weight, of these possibilities means a degree of uncertainty is demanded. You can wager five dollars on the “certainty” that the Cardinals will score 5 or more runs tomorrow, but you wouldn’t place a bet that Viganó is right or wrong. And people are beginning to realize that they must be on the right side without knowing for certain which is the right side. In other words, we weren’t told this was going to be on the test.

Being comfortable with ambiguity is not the same as preferring it. Or even liking it, for that matter. It means we’d rather deal with ambiguity than be wrong. Defaulting to the “required answers” when they don’t fit the question is deciding not to deal with the ambiguity though the ambiguity is true and the answer isn’t.

Don’t be wrong. Swim in the ambiguity.

1. Greitens, Eric. The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, The Making of a Navy SEAL (p. 58). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

2. You’d be disappointed and a bit worried to learn how much time I spent scouring the internet for a picture of Jay Stewart dressed as a baby and tethering a goat.

3. Though I am comfortable with ambiguity, that comfort is limited to matters that lie in the future or trivial things. I have no patience with ambiguity for matters that have been settled since the Apostles walked the earth, and by them.