Over the past week, I spent every spare moment I could find studying for midterms.

Our 14-year-old son, who entered ninth grade in the fall, seemed to have gotten the idea that high school was some sort of optional extra, like an educational dipping sauce, and that he could and would get by just fine with an eighth-grade education. He therefore made the conscious decision to take off the months of September, October, November and, amazingly, December. My wife and I had unsettling visions of spending our golden years telling our unemployed 48-year-old offspring to move over on the couch and hand over the remote.

As a result, when midterms came along, I decided to ride him like Seabiscuit and study with him every evening from dinner until bedtime.

I was OK all the way through English. I kind of remembered the stories he had read, which included a hokey Edgar Allan Poe story and one about a rich depraved count who hunts people, which was kind of cool. And I remained pretty much in the game through social studies and geography (we live in the Allegheny Plateau Region of Pennsylvania, something I hadn't realized). Spanish wasn't so bad, given that I'd had eight years of that language in school and every once in a while paused on "Dora the Explorer" while switching channels.

But when we got to biology, it started to get kind of hairy. We had to memorize the five kingdoms of classification (there are, of course, dweebs out there who argue for six kingdoms due to the existence of archaebacteria. What a bunch of dolts!) We studied the structure of a cell membrane, which was way more complicated than I thought it ought to be.

We barely got through the endocytosis, which is the process through which cells take in outside food sources, when my son informed me that there are actually two forms of endocytosis we had to worry about: phagiocytosis and lynocytosis. My head started to hurt and get hot, like my brain was full of angry bees.

It suddenly occurred to me that it's a lot harder being a ninth-grader than it was when I was a ninth-grader. In high school, I fell into that straight "B" category with an occasional "C." I didn't exactly need to learn a trade (even though, once or twice, my parents made that helpful suggestion), but nobody was going to vote me most likely to win a Nobel Prize.

I had biology at some point in high school, but I don't remember any of this stuff coming up. I remember we dissected a frog, and learned the names of all the bones in the human body, but I really don't remember endless lists of bacteria and amoebas, and I know phagiocytosis never ever came up, let alone lynocytosis.

I had algebra, which seemed to involve a lot of 3x's and negative y's, and I somehow got through it. I never knew what it was about and, as a matter of fact, still don't. I have a dim memory of something called the "quadratic equation" which I'm sure someone, somewhere, uses. I don't. I learned enough to fake my way through till graduation, but the stuff kids come home with today looks like something Einstein might have broken his pencil and pulled his mustache out over.

On top of all the information kids have to master in school, there's all the stuff that has been invented in the time since I graduated. In order to watch TV, my kids have to negotiate three remotes, a cable box and a DVD player. I had to flip a switch and maybe adjust the antenna. If the picture went out, we thumped the TV on the side. High schoolers today spend half their time texting each other with the latest news and gossip. I just sat at home and waited until tomorrow to find out what was happening. My kids have to know how to sync an iPod. I just put a record on the turntable and dropped a needle.

Sitting at the dining room table with my son, I realized, to my horror, that even though I'm technically a full-grown adult (I have a car and house, I vote, I drive and I can, and often do, buy beer) I don't know enough to get through the ninth grade.

As we wound our way through the intricacies of cell structure, and I pretended to know what a Golgi body was, I said a prayer of thanks that I got through school back when expectations were so blissfully low.

If not, I'd probably still be at home with my parents, sitting on the couch, and grumbling when my dad crankily told me to move over and give up the remote.

First Published: January 17, 2009, 5:00 a.m.