The Best Laid Plans (8 page)

“I’ll be ready. Good night, Daniel,” Muriel replied.

“Nice to meet you, Daniel,” chimed Lindsay.

I sauntered out of the room, this time to only a smattering of applause from my adoring fans. In another week, I’ll need to fall off the boardwalk into the water to restore my tragicomic standing at the Riverfront Seniors’ Residence. Jasper gave me the thumbs-up as I hit the crash bar on the front door. I waved and was out.

“Okay, what am I in for?” I asked and looked at Angus, sitting on the couch in his living room. I again sat in the easy chair and sipped a Coke – the course syllabus open on my lap. Without answering, he handed me a large binder with many coloured tabs – week one, week two, week three, etcetera. I flipped through it and found talking points to carry me through the weekly lectures for the entire course. For the second time in as many days, the phrase
I am saved
shoved its way into my thoughts.

“This is perfect! How long did it take you to pull this together?” I inquired.

“You’re holdin’ in yer hands the product of nearly 20 years of survivin’ this abominable class. I’ve taught E for E five times in two decades, and I’m sane today because of that binder,” he noted. “The more you can lose yourself in those lectures, the less engaged with the class you’ll need to be. Just ignore ’em and keep on talkin’. It’s easier that way.”

“How many students will there be?” I asked.

“Well, the course is mandatory for all 120 first-year engineers, but about half of ’em won’t show up after the first class. If you don’t feel like talkin’, you can always lob a provocative question into the seats and let the discussion flow,” Angus said.

I turned to the talking points for the first lecture and followed through them. They looked straightforward to me.

“Yer first encounter with the philistines tomorrow is not a full three hours but just an hour-long orientation so that you can introduce yourself, set the tone and direction, and get the hell out of Dodge.”

By this time, Angus had arranged the chess board and was sitting patiently with black. I set aside his E for E bible and slipped into the seat with white. I’d been playing a bit online since my last encounter with Angus and felt a little more confident at the board. I remembered his comments about the shortcomings in my game and tried to avoid them this time around. I kept my queen on the back rank for an appropriate length of time. I paid more attention to my pawn structure – something I seldom did. I castled at the earliest opportunity, securely sequestering my king under the protection of three pawns and a rook. Finally, I was careful not to split infinitives, dangle participles, promulgate nonexistent verbs like
prioritize, access
, and
impact
, or end my sentences with a preposition. (That was a practice up with which Angus would not put. My apologies to Winston Churchill.)

I won the first game. Angus was steamed. I’d taken his queen with a clever little move where I sacrificed my bishop to check the king, revealing a threat to his queen by my rook. Of course, he had to take my bishop with his king (he was in check), so I calmly took his queen with my revealed rook. Nice. It was the kind of move you can pull on a player like Angus once. So I did.

I was still enjoying my victory and lounging on my laurels when he advanced his queen pawn to start game two. I could tell Angus was mad at himself for underestimating me. It took 13 moves for him to pulverize me in game two. A combination of his
anger-induced determination and my game-one honeymoon hangover was my swift undoing.

We shook hands and decided we’d play the rubber match the following night after my campaign meeting. I asked Angus if he’d like to come to meet the campaign team.

“Och, that’s a shame, but I just cannae do it tomorrow night. I’m rustproofin’ the steel plate in my head,” he deadpanned. A simple “No, I don’t think so” would have sufficed.

As before, he walked me down to the boathouse and disappeared into his workshop while I climbed the long stairway to bed. I was beat again that night.

The heating grates once again gave up the sounds of Angus working on the hovercraft and talking. I couldn’t make out the muffled words, but the tone seemed friendly. I heard nothing for a long while as I lay down and closed my eyes. As I dozed off, again I heard faint weeping, drifting up through the vents.

Battle stations. The next afternoon, as my eyes followed the steeply raked seats all the way up to the top, I had a sense of how the Christians might have felt scanning the rabble in the colosseum before the lions were let loose. The analogy was more than architectural. In all, 120 engineering students populated the first-year class. As expected, given the course and the fact that the first class was just an orientation session, I confronted only about 80 students. About a third of them wore purple construction hard hats. I kid you not. The engineering pack mentality was alive and kicking. I just didn’t want to be on the business end of the boot.

Both women in the class also wore hard hats, confirming their membership in the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em society.” My heart went out to them. I really didn’t think, as many did, that male engineering students were bona fide misogynists. However, I did believe that they succumbed to peer pressure for sustained periods and honoured traditions that undervalued women and nurtured stereotypes, particularly where nursing students were concerned. One skim through the engineering-student news paper,
The Pipe
, provided ample evidence.

I made the mistake of writing my name on the blackboard, followed by “Department of English.” After ten fruitless minutes of trying to bring the class to order through more civilized means, I thwacked (intentionally) and broke (unintentionally) a yardstick over the lectern. It made quite an impressive noise, after which
the students settled down – out of curiosity, I was sure, and not out of respect for authority. I apologized to the burly engineer in the third row who’d been struck by the jagged two feet of yard stick I no longer held. I handed him a Kleenex I found in my pocket and noticed that the bleeding stopped shortly thereafter.

“This class is English for Engineers, in case that wasn’t already clear,” I began. “I’m Professor Addison. I am not an engineer … but I play one on TV.” Not a ripple. It was so quiet you could hear my bowels clench.

“What show?” some smartass shouted. I realized in an instant the query was genuine, delivered in earnest.

“Don’t worry about it. That was my poor attempt at humour,” I backfilled.

“Will this be on the exam?” Again, straight-faced. Serious question. I weighed my options and ignored it. I’d decided to attempt the Socratic teaching method, which meant posing the right questions to prompt discussion and debate and delivering the students to enlightenment – or, at least, dropping them off at a gas station on the outskirts of basic understanding.

“Let me ask you all something. How many of you would rather not be here?” I surveyed the room, stopped counting hands at 63, and raised my own. “Perhaps it would be easier to ask how many of you
are pleased
to be here?” Again I counted. I lost count after two as there were just no more hands in the air.

“Could I see you two guys after class, please?” I commented. Though I was kidding, my two supporters in the back lowered their hands and nodded. They looked like quite a pair despite the distance between us, resembling finalists in a Johnny Rotten look-alike contest.

“How many of you think that engineering students have enough to learn without having English foisted on you?” Blank looks. Rewind. “In this context,
foisted
kind of means the same thing as
forced.”
I was going to use the word
synonym
, but it was only a one-hour class. The penny dropped for most of them, and again,
a large majority thrust their hands in the air. I approached the tiered seats and pointed to a smallish fellow, who I thought I could take if I had to. “Other than your engineering texts, what was the last book you read?”

Smallish fellow thought for a moment before replying,
“Beam Me Up, Scotty
by James Doohan.” I saw much righteous nodding behind him.

“Ah yes,
Star Trek
, featuring one of the most famous split infinitives in modern history,” I interjected, trying to find some small patch of common ground with my audience. Again, blank faces. “You know, ‘To boldly go’ etcetera, etcetera.” Nothing. Dead air. I waved the white flag and moved on.

“Okay, what about you?” I nodded to a skinny car guy, sporting a Corvette T-shirt, a Chevrolet cap, and long, stringy hair that was in desperate need of an oil change. “What have you read lately?”

“I just finished an awesome autobiography –
The Camaro Story.”

I chuckled at his little pun. He seemed puzzled by my reaction, and I realized he was utterly oblivious to his inadvertent wordplay. Okay, screw Socrates. He’d obviously never taught engineers. I turned my back on the class for a moment to gather my thoughts and then, once more, leaped into the breach.

“Let me take a stab at explaining why this course is required for engineering students. I hope you would agree that university shouldn’t simply be a factory that churns out engineers or dentists or whatever specialized personnel society happens to need at the time. Universities should make us more worldly, teach us how to think critically, and prepare us to be responsible, well-rounded global citizens.”

“Will this be on the exam?” someone interrupted. I ignored him and kept on.

“The word
university
means ‘of many schools.’ In the original vision of the university, students studied a very broad range of subjects – philosophy, history, languages, logic, mathematics, art, and science – all to earn a bachelor of arts degree. Students
sampled
many schools
of thought. In the last half-century, we’ve drifted quite a distance from this historical model, and your very focused curriculum is a product of that evolution. Your course of study is, relatively speaking, very narrow. Yes, it’s complex, challenging, demanding, and important, but it represents a very thin slice of civilization’s vast field of knowledge. I make no judgments about that, but it is true.” I stopped to see whether anyone was still with me. It was obvious no one was, so I continued. “English is the engineering faculty’s one concession to the broader world. This course should be just as important to you as math or fluid mechanics because you cannot realize your full potential as engineers if you cannot communicate your ideas. And you can’t communicate your ideas without a passing understanding of the English language.”

“Will this be on –”

“No, this will not be on the exam! I’m just trying to get you all to accept the need to be here.” Few did, it seemed. After such a promising start, the rest of the hour went straight downhill from there.

My two allies in the back appeared engaged, unless their nodding was actually nodding off. After the class, they waited until the others had left and approached the front, where I was deciding whether it was too late to get my old job back. The obvious leader of the two wore Stuart tartan stretch pants, a black Punk Lives! T-shirt, and two-tone Doc Marten stompers. A Ramones ball cap covered what turned out to be a hairless scalp. Sizeable black skull studs pierced both ear lobes. The other guy sported black and pink striped hair, coiffed, it appeared, with a weed-whacker. He wore those inexplicably fashionable low-slung, baggy shorts with enough room to cradle a cantaloupe in the crotch. His green boxers extended a full four inches above the waistline of his sagging shorts. But wait, there’s more. A black on black Iggy Pop T-shirt and multi coloured bowling shoes completed the ensemble. A hoop through his lower lip, a safety pin in his nose, and an “I eat nails!” tattoo on the left side of his neck made him as approachable as a coiled cobra.

“Professor, you wanted to see us?”

“Actually, I just wanted to thank you for being supportive today,” I replied.

“No problem, Professor. We actually wanted to speak to you. I’m Pete Cadogan, and this is Pete Martelli.” We shook hands rather formally.

“Well, that should make it twice as easy to remember your names.”

“Right. We called the Liberal headquarters in Ottawa about getting involved in the campaign in Cumberland-Prescott. We live there and hate that tool Cameron. Anyway, we were told to talk to you. What a coincidence that we found you teaching our English class,” Pete1 explained as Pete2 nodded like a bobble-head.