It was one of those moments all parents dread.

I knew it was coming, knew the lingering luck that had carried me from grades K through four had likely run low, but I never expected it to happen so early in the school year. Certainly not on her very first homework assignment.

“Can two be an array?” my fifth grader asked.

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking,” I said, my mind quickly skimming its index of rays. X-ray. Rachel Ray. Manta ray. Dough ray.

No uh-ray.

“It says to list all the numbers up to 20 that can be arranged into arrays with two rows. The only one I’m not sure about is 2. I don’t know if 2 can be an array.

“Sounds like a good question for Geoff,” I said, hoping for a successful deflection. “You know how much he likes it when you ask him math questions.”

“Already did,” Celeste said. “He wasn’t sure. Said I should ask you.”

I detected a hint of smug satisfaction, the kind some children get when a parent is unable to provide a quick, confident-sounding answer to a homework question. If only I could go back and simply say, “Yes. Of course two can be an array.” Oh, how she’d be respecting me now. How she’d be looking up in admiration.

And how she’d be mocking me the next day if I were wrong.

“Let me think about it a few minutes,” I said.

“Going to try looking it up on the Internet, aren’t you?” she asked, one eyebrow knowingly raised.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” I said. “I actually happen to be going online so I can redraw my will.”

She waggled her fingers and made an exaggerated O with her mouth, her standard I’m-oh-so-scared look. 

I suspect it was a moment much like this that inspired some television executive to come up with that ‘Are you smarter than a 5th grader’ show, the one where adult contestants must correctly answer ten questions taken directly from textbooks of first through fifth graders. When the grown-up is wrong or chooses to end the game, they have to admit to the audience that they’re not smarter than a fifth grader.

They usually aren’t. I haven’t seen that many episodes, but in the ones that I have, the grown-ups haven’t done well. Much to the delight of the fifth graders they have on the show.

My own fifth grader flopped her homework sheet on the table before me. “All these you see here are arrays,” she said, each word carefully enunciated and spoken painfully—mockingly—slow. I sat and listened as she continued her explanation, and as she did, out came the answer to her own question.

“You know, sometimes we grown ups play dumb so that our kids are forced to learn how to figure things out on their own,” I said.

“Nice try,” said Celeste, hopping onto the long, wooden file cabinet next to my desk, unready to relinquish what she believed to be her upper hand.

“King Phillip called out for green soup,” she said. “My brother found amazing rocks. Do you know what those are?”

“Arrays?” I answered hopefully. She laughed, shaking her head.

“Then I say they’re bizarre sentences completely unrelated to anything we’ve been talking about,” I said.

“They’re called mnemonic devices,” she said. “They help you remember the order of stuff. The first letters of each word of the King Phillip one helps you remember the organization of living things. Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. The brother one is for the order of vertebrates. Mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles.”

I don’t need to be on a game show to find out if I’m smarter than a fifth grader. Much as it pains me to this, I’m apparently not.

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