Of the 20,000+ students I've had in Intro Bio, only one ever had a perfect 100% score. Her name (we'll say) was Kathleen Kelly, and she was always known as Miss Kelly.

So was this paragon of a person a graduate of the Emma Willard school, or some other tony prep school? No. She had gone directly out of high school into the Merchant Marine, an extraordinarily unusual choice for a woman 30 years ago. She was tough as nails, and eventually settled down as a deck hand on an oil tanker, making the Saudi run.

She did this for a number of years, but then one day, as she was offloading some equipment with the bow winch, the winch cable snapped, flew through the air like a steel anaconda, and snapped her spinal cord at L3. Paralyzed from the waist down.

She got a good financial settlement from the shipping line, but what was she going to do with the rest of her life? Whatever that might be, it didn't include sitting in a wheel chair, so she she quickly came to a decision. She would become a neuroscientist, and work on spinal cord injuries. Being a Rhode Islander, she came to URI.

So, at the age of 30, 12 years out of high school, she came to Intro Bio. This was before the ADA kicked in, and we weren't used to students in wheelchairs. But, like clockwork, 10 minutes before lecture began, Miss Kelly rolled in to the front row.

I don't think I have ever met such a single-minded, purposeful person in my life. NOTHING was going to prevent her from getting in to grad school-and nothing did. Her 100% moved her rapidly into legend status.

So what happened to Miss Kelly? She got into Yale for grad school, and when I finally lost track of her, she was a neuroscientist at the Scripps Institute for Neurobiology in San Diego.

I tell this story to students who complain that they can't get good grades because they (fill in the blank).