Tertiary Source

Remember the significance of the three circles!

2009-07-10 14:57:28
When I was a freshman I took Philosophy 110. It was a big lecture, and the professor had a habit of rambling (which I mostly found entertaining); there was the customary falloff in attendance as the term went on. During one lecture the professor was working up to making three points and put some bullets on the whiteboard: 
o
o
o
He then promptly distracted himself with a tangent about how boring people drive Fords, and whenever you see a Ford it's being driven by a boring person. After a couple minutes of this he turned back to the board and said, "I have no idea why I made these three circles. They must mean that boring people drive Fords." This got a chuckle out of the class, and he added, "Remember that! It'll be on the final."

For the rest of the term, at the end of class, he would end the class with "And remember the significance of the three circles!" Those of us who had been in class that day would laugh, and those who hadn't would sort of look confused.

The final exam was four essays, presented like this: 

Instructions: Answer one question from each part.
Each essay is 25% of your grade.
--------------------------------
Part I:
1. a question about Plato
2. a question about Aristotle
--------------------------------
Part II:
3. a question about Hegel
4. a question about Mill
--------------------------------
Part III:
5. a question about some other guy
6. a question about one of his contemporaries
--------------------------------
Part IV:
7. What is the significance of the three circles?
This class was big enough there were graduate students who helped with grading (an experiment for the philosophy department; I don't know whether they still do that). I talked with one of them after the term was over. He said the GTAs had revolted and everyone was scored based on their three "real" essays. The distribution of people who remembered the three circles was interesting, though. About a third wrote the right answer ("boring people drive Fords"), and most of the rest admitted they didn't know. But he said there were several people who wrote long essays about "how the circle is the perfect shape, and three is the perfect number, and all the other metaphysical bullshit you might write if you'd never taken a class in philosophy."
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