Are Cal Poly students smarter than fifth graders?

Do you ever sit around thinking about what it would be like to time travel Michael J. Fox-style? Of course, hippies would travel to the 1960s, intense drug users would line up to go to the Disco Bloodbath of the 1990s and entrepreneurs would go to the Gold Rush of 1848.

I’d like to go to a time when our greatest technological advance was the refrigerator or the calculator. I feel inundated, not with technology (I love my computer, iPod, GPS and Jimmy Buffet Margaritaville Blender), but with over-simplified advertising.

The new Blackberry commercial alone kills at least 24 of my brain cells every time I listen to it. Thank god for DVR (another technological advance I enjoy)! Blackberry’s ingenious pitch is that the phone makes clicking noises when you touch it. Oh my god. It’s the second coming of cellular devices! Seriously though, why is it that not one person, but a large group of educated advertisers think that that is an appropriate and appealing way to attract the general public to their product?

Though slamming my head against any hard object nearby is always my first thought, the second is usually, “Does anyone fall for this?” Well, my answer up until a few days ago would have probably been no, but this week it was brought to my attention that maybe our generation’s common intelligence is declining and we are more frequently distracted by “the shiny things.”

I sat in my class this week with 20 other people, some who I consider to be smarter that me, others of equal intelligence. It is safe to say, however, that all 20-something of us are highly intelligent (I mean, we go to Cal Poly). My teacher began to rant about not having the ability to see something the way it is in reality; this of course fell into a metaphor about using a viewfinder on a camera.

Not a hard metaphor to keep up with right? Well, at least that is what I thought. The majority of the class stared blankly at my teacher: all of them seeming to say, “A viewfinder? Tomfoolery! We’ve never heard of anything like that.” It was as if my teacher has just told us our papers would have to be etched into stone instead of typed out on our computers. (Note: a viewfinder is the small hole you can look out of on a camera, especially if your digital screen breaks.)

This viewfinder debacle may seem to be a miniscule problem, but I like to think of it as a tiny window into the mind of an advertiser. We are in college, most would say in the prime of our intelligence, and yet in the minds of advertisers the most gullible. Are we losing our minds before Cal Poly can meld them into full functioning scholarly brains?

Our vocabulary is declining, our math skills are disintegrating, we are losing our common sense. I’m afraid that we might know quantum mechanics and be able to recite Wordsworth from heart, but wouldn’t be able to win on “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?”

I plead with all of you to put down the textbook and pick up some fourth-grade trivia flashcards. Relearn what Manifest Destiny is, remember just when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, play Duke Nukem and pick up an old camera that you can attach a flash bulb to (and use it). Relearn what you’ve forgotten.

Maybe the people at Blackberry are smarter than I think. Maybe they have college students pressing their faces up against the TV screen salivating over a touch phone that makes clicking noises. All I know is that when “Are you Smarter than a Fifth Grader?” calls me, I’ll be ready to tell Jeff Foxworthy that the capital of Oklahoma is in fact Oklahoma City.

Rachel Newman is an English junior. “That’s What She Said” takes a fresh and lighthearted look at issues at Cal Poly and in San Luis Obispo.