When I was in college, carefully avoiding math courses, the Powers That Be changed the rules for my major, so I wound up having to take a statistics course. Fortunately, I had an instructor who understood that the vast majority of the people in the class were lousy at math.

This didn't make the course as easy as you might think; but he was more interested that we understand the meaning of research results than that we memorized how to get them. So all the tests were open-book, and he told us which formulas we would need to know for each test.

He said that when we wrote out the no-cheating pledge on our test papers, we should amend it to say, "I have accepted no help on this test, except from the instructor." And he never got too far away, in case someone just didn't understand what a question meant.

I think it's safe to asume that most of the people in the class learned the concepts well enough to appreciate them when reading research results, and that we all appreciated the instructor's approach to the material.

He had a real appreciation for the notion that we were not all planning to go to graduate school and work on doctorates in quantitative psychology. Most of us, in return, appreciated that he was indeed doing just that.

There you have it. A memory piece about something that had the potential to be a very bad experience turning out to be a very good one.