Now, every person who wants to graduate from Oregon needs to take a science requirement. Everyone. The two most popular line of courses are Geology and Astronomy. I learned later from a friend at the university who was a Bio-Chem major that these courses are affectionately referred to as "Rocks for Jocks" and "Stars for 'Tards". Fair enough. Clearly, I had chosen the lesser of two evils.

So I showed up to class on the first day of the semester and took my seat along with roughly 300 other individuals. Our professor was a former NASA employee although he never said exactly what it was he did for NASA and, for some reason, I always got the impression that he had been fired. He was funny, he was acerbic and he clearly understood the demographics of these types of classes. No one sitting in front of him wanted to be there, no one cared about him and no one really cared about Astronomy. He knew it and, in many ways, he relished it. (On an unrelated sidenote, the final in this class took place at the same time as Oregon's opening round game of the NCAA tournament the year that the Ducks went to the Elite 8. The professor handed out the tests and then, without a word, walked to the front of the class, flipped a switch and pulled up ESPN's live running score on the projector. It was a pretty cool move.)

On the first day of class, the professor quickly laid out how the course would be graded. Each week there was a short quiz on-line that we were allowed to take while using our text books. There was also a midterm and a final which were both 100 questions, multiple choice and, he assured us, fairly difficult. That was it. Then he asked us how we wanted to be graded. We had two options. A standard percentage system or a bell curve. And we got to vote by a show of hands. Everyone in the classroom heard the word "curve" and predictably voted for that option including myself. Without exaggeration, the vote was roughly 348-3 in favor of the curve.

The professor just shook his head and with a wry smile told us that, in no uncertain terms, we were all morons. "Do you realize" he said slowly while pacing back and forth in front of a huge chalkboard, "that you just condemned 10% of your classmates to fail this class?" He went on. "Look around you. Now only 10% of you seated here will get A's. If you voted for the other option every single person in this class could have earned an A if they wanted to."

I was sitting in one of the back rows of the lecture hall nodding. "Yep. You're exactly right," I thought. "But YOU take a look around. Are you seeing these people? It's the first day of class and I guarantee there are 200 people in here with hangovers. The guy in front of me is wearing a Big Johnson T-shirt. Remember those? They weren't funny 10 years ago and this guy still has one. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be able to do better than 90% of the people in this class while putting in WAY less work than I would have if I actually had to earn a 90%"

And I guessed right. Midway through the course, attendance for any given class probably average around 70. Every class was a lecture, the on-line quizzes were actually pretty difficult even with the textbook and the midterm and final were brutal. During the semester, I attended a smattering of the lectures, made sure to complete my quizzes and scored about 73% on the two tests. 

My C- effort put me in the 98th percentile for that class. And I knew it would. I was going to school in the pot smoking capital of the United States. You're telling me all of these people are going to remember to take a weekly quiz on-line for their Gen Ed Astronomy class? They're going to see a midterm question about quasars and supernovas and just start staring at their hands for 20 minutes. 

I was reminded of this class a few days ago when I was trying to sit down with Elliott to do a puzzle. He took the pieces, banged them a few times together loudly, bit one, dropped them and then tried to crawl into the dishwasher for the third time that morning. I worried that I wasn't doing enough to engage him. That I wasn't doing enough to encourage learning. I worried about whether he was eating healthy enough food and whether he was getting enough interaction with other children. 

And then I thought about Stars for 'Tards. There are more than 6 billion people in this world. A high percentage of them are parents. And an even higher percentage of them are idiots. So that means there are an AWFUL lot of idiots out there raising children. And yet, people are churning out perfectly acceptable kids all the time. Now I'm certainly not the best parent in the world. Today I was writing an e-mail and heard a panicked shrieking behind me and discovered that Elliott was stuck on top of our piano and petrified because he didn't know how to get down. So I rescued him and gave him some crackers to calm him down. That's some C- parenting right there. But I know I've got to be doing at least as good of a  job as a lot of people out there.

So, if I had a vote, I think I'd choose for parenting to be graded on a bell curve as well. Just like in Astronomy class which had the girls who attended and recorded every lecture, studied for each quiz and highlighted the textbook in 8 different shades of marker, there are plenty of overachieving moms out there with their babies who are reciting Trotsky through sign language at six months old, but I'm still going to take my chances and assume that I can simply do better than the majority of the general populace.