Bird Course

On leaving the nest and flying hard into a window

I woke with a lump in my throat, a hard mass a couple of inches long and tucked under the left side of my jaw. The node had appeared a couple of weeks earlier and slowly grown. Now it hurt to swallow, and I felt awful. Days later, a doctor at Student Health would see it and thank me for having an interesting medical problem, but so far I had tried to ignore it. Exams were coming. I had priorities. I would rest later. Today was the first mid-term for PHYS 105, the first-year physics class for physics majors with a reputation as a killing field for physics frosh.

Being sick, I slept badly. My burning eyes drifted open and took in my room. About six feet by twelve, a single bed jammed between a small desk with shelves above and a narrow closet beside built-in drawers and a small mirror. My own room in residence, a bonus for winning an entrance scholarship. There were a few posters on the walls, but the shelves were my trophy case: my high school diploma, my scholarship letter, my Grade 12 yearbook, and my hockey provincials championship ring. Clothes and loose-leaf notes were scattered everywhere, shoes and a backpack were tossed at the foot of the bed, and my desktop was buried in clutter. I got up and showered, my unmade bed adding to the disarray.

I dragged myself to the cafeteria and forced down some cold cereal and toast despite the pain in my throat. Then I was back in my room, frantically studying. I was always doing that. Once, my floor don walked by and did a double-take. “I know you’re working hard, Ken,” he said, “because the only clear section of carpet in your room is between the door and your desk!” Working harder was how I managed stress.

Working harder had so often paid off before. The yearbook above my desk testified to that. The faux leather cover and embossed title gleamed in black and gold, the school colours. It was a thin, dark treasure chest full of gems that I would open and look at for encouragement. There were snapshots of my dorm crew, Greg and Henry and Darren and Pete and Gunner, smiling or caught by surprise. There were photos of the girl that I’d fallen for ass over tea kettle, who sat with me on a railroad track in the warm golden light of sunset on the prairie in June and laughed her beautiful, ridiculous laugh. Written in margins and across printed text were notes and signatures from classmates and teachers, each wishing me well and expressing easy confidence that my future was as warm and bright as that sunset, as golden as the inset on the yearbook cover.

“Come back and see us when you’re famous!” wrote my biology teacher, and could it be, was he right, was it written? That book was a well of memories that raised a different lump in my throat and seemed to vouchsafe a promise of what I was becoming. It was a talisman that would evoke the old magic and make the stress work pay off again. It had to.

Time to go. The lump of promise plunged into my gut.

I recall the day as bright and beautiful, a postcard image of the long southern Ontario autumn. It was a jewel of an October day, crisp but not what anyone back home would call cold. The sky was a cloudless azure near the trees, deepening to sapphire overhead. The maples around campus seemed to be on fire, leaves blazing red and orange and yellow as they prepared to fall to earth. But that deep blue sky and those flaming trees could be an insertion based on many such days that I saw that autumn.

On the day of the exam, I noticed very little. I was wrapped tightly inside my pounding head, my breathing was shallow, and I was more afraid than any mid-term should have made me.

Dad had come to visit me in September. Old washed-out photos show us on the steps of Gordon House on a day just like this. I squint into the sun in my loud high school jacket, black and gold and white. He grins proudly in a jacket and tie, tan trench coat, and Irish cap. His son was at the university, on the path to success blazed by generations of Gracies before. Two generations in a row had gone to Oxford. One of my cousins got a double first. Another later rose high at the BBC. A third would climb the ranks in the Bank of England, at times interacting with some guy named Carney.

I wanted so badly to show what I could do and to make my family proud. I had read War and Peace in high school for fun, in part because Dad said that I’d never get through it. I went to Ottawa to study the Canadian political system in Grade 11. CBC Radio’s Ideas program enthralled me: the quiet, incisive presence of host Lister Sinclair and the breathy insights of producer David Cayley introducing me to topics like Religion and the New Science, The Rebellions of 1837, and the writings of Ivan Illich and William Blake. It lit in me a blazing fire to learn and to grow and to contribute something of my own.

And now the moment had arrived for Kenny, Captain of Gondor, to show his quality. But poor results on early calculus assignments, middling grades on lab reports, and difficulty keeping up with the pace of my lectures had shaken me. The mid-terms were the moment to turn it around, to get on the right path. They couldn’t go that badly, right?

A five-minute walk brought me to Stirling Hall, shaped like a giant hockey puck. At the bottom of the curved pit that was our lecture hall stood our professor, Dr. Howard J. Wintle. Wintle was an old-school Englishman who designed PHYS 105 as a crucible to test the aptitude, the interests, and the sheer mettle of first-years. Wintle did not mind offending people. Wintle did not care if you reacted badly. My friend Chris coordinated student evaluations late in the year. He asked Wintle what he thought. Wintle loudly stated that he never read them. Chris stared at him, mouth open. “I’ve been here twenty years,” Wintle explained. “I’m fireproof. If there’s a real problem, we work it out with the Dean, otherwise what’s the point?”

Wintle spit out odd but memorable sayings during lectures and tutorials. Of a particular problem: “Friction is working like stink.” Part way through a derivation: “At this stage, you start smelling rotten fish.” And, about the final exam, “Clearly, you’re not going to be able to finish all of it, so what the hell.”

In class, Wintle wore a tie with a collared shirt whose sleeves went only to the elbow. When emphasizing a point or declaring some result, he stuck his elbows out and flapped his forearms up and down, an enormous vulture. He perched in his nest with his large square eyeglasses glinting, smiling up at us as we filed in for the mid-term.

The exam was a haze, and soon done. I went home to bed. Classmate Craig, who lived on my floor in residence, stopped in to ask me how I thought it went. I lobbed the usual bromides about “Hard, but not too bad,” “I think I did ok on Question 2,” and so on. I didn’t convince him.

He left. I slept and dreamed of floating in the clouds, surrounded by matrices that I couldn’t solve.

A couple of weeks passed and I slowly recovered from my illness, though the lump under my jaw remained. Then we got the exams back.

Wintle had laid the clutch of papers on the corner of the long desk at the bottom of the pit. He hovered nearby as we bustled through to collect them. My grade was written at the top of the first page: 11/30, 36%. Not just bad, not even just a fail; a miserable fail, an unheard-of fail. I took a seat next to Kent, my physics study buddy. His mark was somewhere in the low to mid-20s. I sat in a daze, throat tight and unable to speak, eyes itching with tears to come and not hearing anything that Kent was saying.

Wintle spoke. We would learn no physics today, but he would school us all the same.

He put up a slide showing the distribution of marks. A few at the top end, some right at the bottom, the majority bunched broadly in the middle.

“You here at the top are all right,” he called in his particular English accent, thin arms waving at the graphic as if preparing for take off.

“You here in the middle have some thinking to do,” he continued.

Then he stopped, leaned one hand on the front desk and pointed at the bottom of the curve with the other. “And you down here,” he declared loudly, “with two or three out of thirty, might want to ask yourselves whether you should be in any university-level physics course a’TALL!!”

By that point in the year, we knew that a ‘bird course’ required very little work to get a high mark and boost your average. Now, we knew that PHYS 105 was the opposite. We sat in stunned silence.

Wintle kept talking, but I stopped hearing. I had the excruciating sense of being exposed as a fraud, and a sense of shame so strong that it was difficult to breathe.

At the end of the lecture, Wintle announced that because it was the first mid-term, he would apply a bell curve to our grades: our mark would be out of 20, not 30, giving me 11/20 or 55%.

Beside me, Kent pumped his fist and exclaimed “Yes! I get 100!” Remembering himself, he looked over at me and said, “Ken, it’s ok! You passed!” Kent was trying to help. I know it now and knew it then. Rarely have I wanted to punch someone more.

Searching ‘retaining wall collapse’ on YouTube returns plenty of hits. A particularly striking video is from one in Coquitlam, BC. A shaft several stories deep has been sunk into the ground with retaining walls on all four sides. Large cracks are visible as the video begins, and you can hear pops and crunches as new ones form. Soil and debris leaks out of small holes, beating a staccato rhythm as it rains down. After a few moments, the sounds intensifying, a whole section of the wall buckles outward and falls, followed closely by a cascade of dark earth. The structure wasn’t sound. It hadn’t been sound for a long time before it gave way.

For most of my life to that point, I had been the smart kid. I did well at all my subjects. I enjoyed learning. I loved being good at it. School and learning gave me solace and encouragement when I was mocked at hockey practice for being overweight. Dropping the names of Napoleon’s marshals got me kudos from my Grade 10 history teacher. Good report cards garnered comments from my father about me being a credit to the family. The black and gold high school where I moved for Grade 12 had an academic reputation and I wondered if I could keep up, but I excelled. The retaining wall held, and look what people had said about me!

The cracks in the wall revealed by those early assignments filled me with dread and sent me furiously pumping wet concrete into the widening gaps, praying that it would hold. Now part of the wall had fallen and the stability of the whole structure was in danger. My identity was in question. The nadir was still to come: 32% on my Christmas exam in linear algebra. But this was the first great defeat.

The mid-term triggered a mass exodus from the course, as Wintle knew it would.

Those who stayed were either really good at physics or, like me, unwilling to yield. Out of 110 students who enrolled in September, roughly 40 of us wrote the final exam. Not everybody made it. Some of us had custom shirts made: Wintle’s bespectacled head atop the body of a bird of prey, talons stretched forward and wings spread wide, framed by the phrase “PHYSICS 105 WAS A BIRD COURSE.” We wore them like medals.

Days after the final, guessing that Wintle had finished his marking, a few of us called his office in succession to ask if we had passed. I was nervous, fearing Wintle’s sharp tongue. “Oh, you’re all right, aren’t you, Ken?” asked Wintle, voice tired but holding no barbs. I heard the shuffling of papers.

“Better than Christmas, Ken. Your father will be moderately pleased with you.”

My final mark was 71%. A “solid second-class citizen,” in Wintle’s words. In September, I would have found that result devastating, but my scale had changed. The wall was being rebuilt. In time, I began to ask why my life needed a wall to hold things in.