The excitement we felt for the new school year seems to be wearing off. Teachers have started assigning homework again, nobody’s broken up with their boyfriend, and there hasn’t been an exciting fight in over a week, so who can blame students if they’re bored already?

A friend of mine came to school wearing a shirt that has become popular among boys who share the school-is-worthless attitude. At our teacher’s request, he read the shirt out loud to the class. Titled “Things they don’t teach you at school,” the shirt gives us a delightfully enlightening list of nonsense.

This shirt, like many others, pokes fun at schools, asking if it is really necessary to attend school when they simply can’t teach you everything there is to know. Ironically, the very existence of this shirt reinforces the age-old reasons for obtaining an education.

The first fact, “Recycling one glass jar saves enough energy to watch TV for three hours,” should bring a smile to the face of most teenagers. Studies show the average teenager watches approximately three hours of television a day. That’s almost one day out of every week. Imagine, if we weren’t so absorbed by the TV, we might actually finish our homework before it was due.

Fact No. 2: “During your lifetime, you’ll eat about 60,000 pounds of food.” Considering the amount of time we spend in front of the TV, this is not a comforting statistic.

Fact No. 3: “No piece of square dry paper can be folded in half more than seven times.” I tried this, and although I didn’t believe it at first, it is true. And it’s a good thing to keep your hands busy with during those three hours most teens spend watching TV.

I’m not left-handed, but if I was, I would be extra careful around right-handed scissors after reading this shirt — “Over 2,500 left-handed people are killed while using products made for those who are right-handed each year.”

“There are more than 10 million bricks in the Empire State Building.” Someone counted?

Here’s a trick for those who prefer fresh produce: “Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.”

“A quarter has 119 groves on its edge, a dime has one less,” and “the Earth weighs around 6.6 sextillion tons.” These facts must have been contributed by our mathematician friend, the same guy who counted the Empire State Building bricks.

Have you ever heard someone say, “I’ll be back in a jiffy?” Well, “A jiffy is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.” That must have been a fast trip to the grocery store.

Just in case you ever decide to go spelunking in a cave, remember, “bats always turn left when exiting a cave.”

“The average chocolate bar has eight insect legs in it.” Extra protein. Yummy.

Although these silly facts are fun, only a few of them have any real use. Most of us are not going to need to know how long it would take to count to one trillion (31,688 years, even if you counted 24-7) to be capable of providing for ourselves. And the truth of the matter is, most of the researchers who uncovered these trivial facts probably went through years of school and earned their Ph.D.’s before an apparel company printed some of their best-kept secrets on this T-shirt.

But until the day when high school students are finally awarded their diplomas, trivia helps us all to pass the time.

Emma Penrod is a junior at Tooele High School.