If you have to test me, please make it multiple choice.

From Alfred’s journal

A woman sat on the bench under my maple this afternoon quizzing her son on state capitals, and he got nine right and froze on Vermont, and she waited. She could have said it begins with an M. She wanted the whole thing pulled up out of him by the roots. I used to think that was the honest way, that anything worth knowing you should be able to produce from nothing on a cold morning with somebody watching. If you have to test me, please make it multiple choice. Switch, who was upside down on the trunk at the time, knows four nut species by taste and could not name one of them, and nobody has ever thought less of him for it. The boy got it eventually. He looked at his shoes the entire time he said it.