the significance of the three circles

In college I took a freshman philosophy class from a professor who was terrifically distractable. One day, he turned to the whiteboard to write down three points, and drew the bullets first:

Then he turned to the class, and apropos of nothing, said, "Have you ever noticed that boring people drive Fords? Whenever you see a Ford, it's being driven by a boring person." He talked for a minute or two about Fords and boring people, turned back to the whiteboard, and said, "I have no idea what these three circles mean. … They must mean that boring people drive Fords. Remember that! It'll be on the final."

Classes for the rest of the semester ended with statements like "for next time the reading is such-and-so — and remember the significance of the three circles!"

This was a big lecture: not the typical liberal-arts class of thirty or twenty or ten students, but in a big lecture hall with about a hundred and fifty students. I think this was an experiment for the department. The class suffered from more than its share of freshman attrition, since there was no immediate consequence for missing any particular class meeting. This frustrated the professor (Cohen, his name was, Shelley Cohen), who made other curmudgeonly remarks about education. He was not a fan of having multiple midterm exams: "There is only one middle of the term!" It was hard to tell how much of his antics were genuine eccentricities versus performative mischief to keep the freshmen entertained. But he was consistent about ending classes with, "remember the significance of the three circles!"

The final came. There were four essay sections. In the first section you could choose between an essay question about Plato or an essay question about Aristotle. In the second section you could choose between an essay question about Kant or an essay question about Kierkegaard. For the fourth section, a quarter of the exam grade, there was only one option: "What is the significance of the three circles?"

Early in the next semester I ran into one of the teaching assistants for the course. He told me there had been a kind of a revolt among the TAs when it came time to assign grades, and they had refused to knock off two letter grades for students who didn't remember this particular bit of whimsy. He told me that about a third of the students had known the correct four-word answer, and that about third had just left the question blank. But many of the others had tried to bluff their way through, writing essays about "how three is the perfect number, and the circle is the perfect shape, and all of the other stupid bullshit you might make up if you had never taken freshman philosophy."