Sometimes the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many. My grade 12 final grades:
Calculus 32%
English 62%
Accounting 65%
Industrial Arts 51%
Phys.Ed. 68%
French 51%
My grade 13 final grades:
Calculus 81%
Chemistry 90%
Business Mathematics 74%
Accounting 75%
World Geography 74%
Functions & Relations Math 92%
My grades as there were when i submitted them to University of Toronto for enrollment consideration (and a nice scholarship to boot):
Accounting 100%
Business Mathematics 100%
World Geography 92%
Functions & Relations 92%
Chemistry 90%
Calculus 81%
or an average of 92.5%
Cha-ching! All 3 Universities that I applied for offered me a full scholarship if I would just please sign the paper agreeing that I would choose them. Thank you very much.
So how did I scheme that? Well to pull a page from the movie Fight Club ...
The first rule about scheming your way into University is: there are no rules when trying to get into University.
The second rule about scheming your way into University is: there are NO RULES when trying to get into University.
Did I manage to hold on to the scholarship into my second year? No. Did I care? No. I had a seat reserved for me at the University of Toronto and thousands of others didn't, that's all I cared about. When I applied for my first job as an English Teacher oversees they asked me simply "do you have a degree?"
"Why yes I do" I replied.
"Is it from a reputable University?" they asked next.
"Why yes it is!" I remarked, "arguably the most reputable University in my country."
Did they ask me how I got in to that university? Nope.
Which just goes to prove that you only need a ticket to the show, you don't have to be the best once you're there. It's just that getting there after I nearly failed half ofmy courses in grade 12 and was told by my Metal Working teacher Mr.Inglis to give up any hope of going to University kind of left the whole idea of going hanging by a thread. My life was ending one minute at a time staying in that horrible High School and for the life of me I couldn't see a way out. Every day I was being bullied and beat up by both students and teachers alike. For four years, well five if I include middle school I didn't anyone call me by my name once, I had been labelled with the name Spock and it stuck like glue to the lips of everybody who spoke to me. That included Mr. Baysarowich my gym teacher in Grade 12 who one afternoon came up to me and booted me in my ass while I was sitting down putting on my running shoes in the hallway.
Hey Mr.Bay you 70 year old prune, come to my Jiu Jitsu gym and fight me for saying that to me 30 years ago, i haven't forgotten you prick.
I didn't attend my 2pm class that day, nor did I go to school the next day or for the rest of the week for that matter. He crossed the line that day and coupled with Mr. Inglis telling me earlier that I would never see the inside of a university I had had enough of Woodlands Secondary School. For a week I had quit school with no intention of ever going back and the only reason I did go back was to meet with my school Councillor who had requested a meeting.
He suggested I attend Ind-Ec an acronym for Individual Education where you study by yourself and have a meeting twice per week with a teacher to show her your progress and pick up new assignments. It didn't work out, but it did show me that there is life outside of high school and that the place I was in was not the only option available to me to get my diploma. It was a very valuable lesson to pick up at age 17 I wish somebody had told me I had options available to me before that.
I began to think, 'hey what else can I study by myself?'
That's when i picked up "find a way, any kind of way" as my motto and I started to research University requirements, how screwed I was, and if there were any ways out of the hole I had dug.
I found out I wasn't that screwed at all. I needed 28 credits to get my Grade 12 diploma and since my dad had made me attend Summer School every year to pick up one extra credit on top of the 8 yearly credits awarded for passing I had the credits I needed to graduate already. I felt relieved. Then I realized that I had been blessed with time, I had almost a year and a half to get my 6 credits needed to pass grade 13. Since I had to stay at IndEc for a whole semester to get a grade and I had already enrolled in Grade 12 Creative Writing which was a subject I didn't need to graduate I looked for a better way to spend my time.
The same day I quit IndEc I discovered I could get credit for a Grade 13 subject by completing it through a correspondence course. By 4pm I had driven downtown, registered and picked up my first lesson of Functions & Relations math.
But you have a 30% in Calculus ... how many of you are saying that? On top of that I never had a mark above 65% in any of the math courses from grade 9-12 either. Ah but see, Woodlands requires every student to take 8 classes a year and attend four a day alternating between the two. Combine that with a hockey schedule that demanded 6 nights a week of commitment and there was precious little time for homework so my marks suffered across the board as a result. But I still understood everything that had been taught, of that I was confident. Besides, I had my ace in the hole at home... my dad.
I present my dad as a character, an eccentric, a comic relief figure in my Dad Stories blogs. But I have to give credit where credit is due my dad was a genius. I knew I'd have to withstand his condescending manner of speaking to me but I knew that he would ensure that every lesson would be sent in without a mistake.
By the start of June I had completed all 20 lessons of the course with not losing a mark and had to sit for the final exam at a teacher's house with 50% of the final grade resting on the result of that exam.
There are no rules, remember that. I had enough cheat sheets stuffed up my shirt and pant sleeves to write a small book with but I had no idea if I would be able to use them or not. I walk into situations prepared for anything so that if the opportunity presents itself i'm ready to capitalize. As it turned out, the teacher left with his family 10 minutes into my exam to go shopping. There weren't any spy cams around back then like there are now so I whipped out my cheat sheets and aced the exam. My final grade was 92% and I knew I was on to something, yet another schemeofschemes was brewing. If only I could trick my way through 5 more courses like that i'd be golden.
Ah, but how to knock off Calculus, a subject that had overwhelmed me while trying to manage 7 other courses and left me with a mark of 30% before i dropped it? I was highly skeptical I could pull off any decent mark in that course.
The only schemer knowledge I had in my back pocket that I could draw upon was all my years of summer school my dad had forced me to take. Though I still thought of it as a waste of a good month of vacation I hadn't forgotten that every course I ever took in the summer had gotten me no less than 80%. Not because I was suddenly brilliant in the month of July but because the course was so short. How can anyone not get at least a 70% on any quiz when that's the only thing you are given to study 5 hours a day every day for 6 weeks? Of course I had my dad back at home to help me in the evenings but he couldn't help me as much as he did in the F&R course as this time I actually had to go to school. I knew I needed another bag of tricks this time and that bag sat down right beside me the first day of summer ... Helen. Like all girls up to that point in my life she didn't acknowledge my existence but with my dad helping me at home the first quiz came a short three days into the class and i scored 100% on it as did she. I was ecstatic. Me, the failure, the kid who thought
had something to do with Aids just a few short months ago nailed a 10 question quiz to perfection. I just had to show off a little bit and I let Helen have a peak at my 10/10 score. It was the best flirting I have ever done with a woman in my life. Suddenly I existed to her, and not only did I exist but she moved her table closer to me, she flirted with me, she went on breaks with me and by the time Friday came I was in love for the first time in my life. I was learning a new life lesson, people will cling to those who can help them get ahead in life and I was just that for her. As long as my marks held up I was able to flirt with her as much as I wanted which got a little excessive. Okay, it got very excessive. After school finished each day at 1pm we both went off to our lifeguard jobs at different locations. Saturday afternoon I quit my job and rode my bike to her pool with my Calculus books under my arm. In my bank i had $9,000 from the previous two summers of work that my dad never let me spend so working made no sense to me now that love was on the line.
Every day from 8-1pm we'd sit through Calculus in summer school and then i'd pedal over to her pool and we'd study together until 8pm and then we'd be on the phone to one another by 9pm working out derivative problems like all young love birds do.
By the time the second week ended I was falling behind her a little bit as I couldn't wrap my head around logarithms and how the derivative of ln(x) could be the letter e, for me e is for egg just like i learned in kindergarten.
The damn log test was coming on the Friday and even with my dad trying to make me understand at home I just wasn't getting it. My two short Cinderella-like weeks were about to come to an end and I was about to be turned into a pumpkin unless I thought of something fast.
There are no rules! As luck would have it our class did not take place in a regular classroom with one door. It was at the classroom at the end of the hall and was adjoined by an adjacent classroom separated by swinging doors. The teacher's desk was right beside those doors and I just happened to notice on the Wednesday that he didn't bring any of his teaching material home, he simply put it in the metal desk and left at the end of class.
Now it's the janitors duty to lock all the classroom doors after school was let out at 1pm and given that it was summer school unlike regular school the place was a ghost town 5 minutes after the bell rang. Thursday afternoon at 1pm I took a 1 hour poop in the second floor teacher's washroom. When I came out at 2pm sure enough the school was deserted and every classroom was locked except of course for the two at the end of the hall.
The desk was unlocked and there in the top folder was Friday's test. My heart pounded as I took it and tiptoed back to the teacher's washroom to the same toilet where I sat and copied all the questions into the back of my notebook. I sneaked back into the classroom to return the folder and then made my way down the stairs and ran for my life once I hit the side door of the school.
I presented the questions to my dad and that night he made me sit at the kitchen table and listen to him work the questions out. It was hard, my dad teaches in a way where he will start writing the solution out and then leave me to figure out the rest of it while he went off and did something else. It was getting close to time for him to go to work at 11pm and there were still about 6 questions left so I begged him ... I actually begged him to solve the questions for me before he went to work so I could study how to do it while he was at work.
Since I hadn't moved since I sat down at the kitchen table from 3pm when I had ran in the door I guess he must have been impressed with me for once. He did exactly what I was hoping he would do and answered the remaining questions for me then drove off to work.
Now earlier that year in French class I had been teamed up with two of the smartest students in the class Frank and Steve and only because Steve had become a close friend from being on the same soccer team that season. I was a 65% student at best while they were upset if they ever received a mark under 95%. To them I was a nuisance being in their group as we had to study a 12 page French story for a quiz the next day in a little study group. We had 45 minutes to read the story to one another and prepare little questions that we thought would be on the test the next day. That was the assignment given by the teacher, but Frank and Steve sat telling jokes for the whole time we were together. I asked them why they weren't interested in reading the story and got a life lesson for an answer as to what sacrifices have to be made to be a champion.
"We'll have it memorized by tomorrow" Frank said and Steve nodded in agreement.
"Why memorize it?" I asked looking at the 12 pages of tiny printed French sentences in the book.
"Because then it is impossible to make a mistake, it is the only way to guarantee getting 100%."
When my dad left for work I knew that in front of me on the table were the exact answers I needed to write on the test the next day to get 100%, I just had to memorize the answers like Frank and Steve did back in French class. So I pulled an all night study session just repeating the same questions over and over until I knew exactly what to write. Right up until the last minute the next day I kept repeating the answers and when my dad came home he asked me in shock
"Have you been up all night?"
It was one of those moments where I should have felt proud by saying yes and letting him feel like his son was going to be brilliant one day but instead i felt like a schemer so i just nodded in the affirmative.
The hardest test of the course up to that point in the curriculum came back with 100% written on it and I was jubilant until Helen called me on it right away.
"You're not that smart," she said looking through my eyes and into my soul, "are you going to let me in on your little secret?"
Goddammit if that wasn't the scariest moment of my life then I don't know what was. Could she see I was a fraud that easily? Or was she just guessing? I managed to swallow hard and keep what I had done a secret, until it wasn't time to keep it a secret.
The next two tests the teacher must have brought them in the day of the test because every night after class I hid in the washroom waiting to check his desk and I found nothing.
"We have to get that exam" she said unknowing that with those words I wanted desperately to marry her. A partner in crime of the opposite sex that beautiful and that willing doesn't just come along too often.
At 1pm that afternoon we were both pretend pooping in the teacher's bathroom. Why the teacher's bathroom? Adults want to get out of school faster than kids do in the summer.
For the life of me I couldn't pick the lock to the desk and instead tried to access it by removing the bigger bottom drawer and climb my fingers up the back while Helen stood guard and watched. It was no use and 30 minutes later I told her we had to give up.
"Keep watch," she said, "I'll go give it a try."
She took her hairpin out and went to work like a pro while I nervously watched from the hallway. It took her all of two minutes to open the desk and take out the folder and she screamed when she saw the exam. She spit the pages in half and gave me 4 to copy and gave herself the others to copy and back we went to the washroom to copy everything down.
We returned everything and as soon as we got outside the school she turned and screamed at the top of her lungs.
"We have to study this all night you know that right?" she said to me and it was time I let her in on my other little secret. "Your dad's that smart?" her eyes glistened as she saw another opportunity. We went to a payphone to call her mom and I don't know what she said ... she was from Yugoslavia ... but it was nasty, mean and she wasn't taking no for an answer.
"Ok we're going to your house"
I think my dad was so happy that I wasn't gay because I finally had brought a girl home that he was willing to help with anything. From 3pm until 11pm the three of us studied Calculus and she called me immediately at 11:30pm when she arrived home to send a shiver down my spine
"What if he changes the questions overnight?"
It didn't matter. On the one hand, just by studying so many days with my dad including the all day session that had just finished I felt like for the first time in my life I could get a decent mark on my own in such a hard course. In a way, it was the best 6 weeks my father and I ever spent together.
The teacher ended up keeping 3/4 of the exam the same with the exception of the 3 long word problems at the end of which we only had to choose one for 20 marks. The one I chose was a variation of a question I had worked on earlier with my dad and was the hardest question by far on the exam. Helen and I had agreed to answer some questions wrong so as to not raise suspicion ... but that hard question at the end I did by myself and got perfect on it. The teacher even wrote "excellent work" beside his check mark and the 20/20. In a life full of failed schemes, answering that question correctly on my own is still one of the best moments of my life and the best way I have ever honoured my father.
My final grade was 81% and Helen beat me with an 88% and promptly broke up with me after the last class, not that I had ever kissed her or anything.
I had the month of August to figure out how I was going to scheme my way through 4 more subjects to get into University, but at least getting into University was starting to look like it was a possibility.
There was a new determination to me and I absolutely did not want to go back to the same high school and not only have to fight every day but also have to carry that stupid workload of 4 or 5 subjects for the whole year, there had to be another way.
Then a friend on my hockey team, Bobby, told me he wouldn't be playing the upcoming year because he was going to be working. "Well what about school?" I asked him thinking he was quitting high school and he told me he was just working the first semester and would return to school the second semester.
Semester? What's a semester? I had never heard of it I just assumed that every school in the city operated the same way my school did. No they did not and not only that but some schools were ranked differently in terms of how tough or easy the school was. This was all news to me.
"Well what's my school rated as?" I wanted to know and went off to research it. There it was ... Woodlands was #3 right behind Lorne Park and Clarkson as the schools with the toughest curriculum. (times have changed heh)
My next question to myself was "where is the closest yet lowest ranked school to my home?" and the answer was T.L. Kennedy Semester School for the Retarded. Well that wasn't in the school name but it was at the bottom of the list and was only 20 minutes away from me so I paid the school a visit to inquire about enrolling. Ambitiously I asked to sign up for the remaining 4 courses that I needed to graduate Grade 13 with so that I could finish and be in University by January.
"Oh it doesn't work like that" the Councillor told me.
"Why not?"
"Well you see, everybody applies for University at the mid-term break in the second semester and they accept you sometime before school ends so you can choose the university you wish to attend before you leave school."
A light bulb went off in my head. I asked to see the school calendar. True enough there it was ... March 7th Spring Break. I felt like Indiana Jones after he found the holy grail except I had found something even greater ... I had found my scheme to get into University.
Why on earth would I endure a whole year of school when all the University's allowed students to submit their marks for consideration at the beginning of March?
An even better idea than that was, why attend school at all in the first semester? All I had to do was enroll in four courses for January and survive 8 short weeks until March 7th. Could I survive that? I asked to see the course selection booklet and i took that home to iron out the rest of my scheme.
I scanned the booklet looking for weaknesses, a hole in the system, something that I could exploit. But my thinking was all wrong, I was looking at the courses griping about how boring this course would be or how much writing that course would be.
I started to refine my thinking. Nobody at T.L Kennedy knew me from Adam. Any course where marks were subjective to teachers opinion were dangerous. I had to take courses where there were only right and wrong answers.
The first course that jumped off the page at me was Accounting because I had taken it in grade 11 and again in grade 12. True I had only scored 65% in it both times but I remembered the beginning of the course to be laughably easy and then got progressively harder and infinitely more boring from the second month on. But all I needed was 8 weeks ... and the first 4 of those weeks would be a review of things I had already studied two times before. I reasoned that with effort I could easily get perfect on my first 2 tests and then hold on for dear life until the spring break.
I ticked off Accounting as my first course for the second semester.
Business Math I had done with my dad when I was younger. Though I hated it back then I also remembered the introductory chapters to be relatively easy compared to the later chapters. Surely I could handle Calculus I could study with my dad for 8 weeks and ace the first 3 business math courses. I ticked that course off as well.
My final selection was Geography because I figured it would be hard to screw up a test in that course in the first 2 months.
The only problem was the Councillor wouldn't let me choose 4 courses that she deemed impossible to pass all at once given my prior school record. I assured her that at the first moment my grades fell I would come to talk to her and she okay'd my selections.
Boy was I right about Accounting. I met my first and only friend in that class, a Peruvian immigrant named Jorge and I helped him through the first part of the course as his English was holding him back. When March came I had 100% still because like I had suspected seeing the same questions early on for the third time made the tests very easy.
Three down, three to go.
Business Math I worked on with my dad and the teacher only gave us 3 tests going into the Spring break. I got perfect on them all.
Four down, two to go.
Geography, as i had suspected the essays and written assignments which were subjective answers gave the teacher room to hand them back to me with marks in the low 80's but I aced his multiple choice style tests and handed in a not too shabby 92% mark for my next to last mark for university.
Five down, one to go.
Ah thank you schemer gods for Chemistry. Thank you dad for also being a genius in Chemistry. Thank you teacher for leaving the final exam in your briefcase unlocked ... again!
Dad helped me survive the first test by studying with me every night. Even so, I only got a 70% and was ready to drop the whole course as it was getting very hard very fast and I was completely lost by the end of January. That was the only test we had and we were marked on little quizzes and miraculously ... homework assignments which I completed with my dad. In a course where I knew absolutely nothing about what was going on, dad saved me and come March 1st I had a 90% to submit to the university.
So the day came where we were told to pick up our university selection forms and we were to have them filled out and turned in before March 7th the first day of the spring break. I didn't think it would work. I thought they'd see right through my little scam. Here I was submitting 6 hard subjects with a 92.5% average and only last year I was struggling to get 50% in half of my subjects?
I sent in the forms and relaxed for the week thinking I was home free if and only if they didn't somehow research how I had attained the A+ average. I had 7 days of rest and relaxation before my scheme was ripped apart like the Titanic hitting that iceburg.
Trying to maintain an A average on 4 courses in a single semester when you're known as a schemer is like pole vaulting into the wind. I was going to crash it was just a matter of when.
By April my overall average had slipped into the 70's with Business Math getting harder by the day and Chemistry might as well have been taught in Russian as I understood none of it. I needed to call a time out, fake an injury, freeze time ... anything to avoid having to take any more tests.
Not only was I dropped out of school faster than a fat kid drops broccoli but I was told I needed a doctor's letter to be able to come back. This was my introduction to forgery as I went off to see about stealing a prescription pad from my Doctor. I just needed something with letterhead on it and then I needed somebody with adult like handwriting to write me the note ... ah the guy from Iraq who managed the 3 For 1 pizza store close to my house ... he'd be willing to play doctor if I bought a few extra pizza's from him.
Bingo, a day later Dr. Ali Hakim Hussein the pizza guy cleared me to return to school and I used the week off to study like I had never studied before. It was the end of April and I could see the finish line now just about 6 short weeks away.
Though they were slipping I knew I could keep Accounting, Business Math, and Geography afloat for the 6 weeks but Chemistry was a lost cause. I had slipped into the 60's and was fading fast. Then, the schemer gods intervened again by way of some fool starting an accidental fire in auto shop class. In Chemistry I sat at the back of the class right in front of the safety sink and the table where the flasks were kept and when everybody got out of their seats to clear the building for what they thought was a fire drill I ducked behind the table.
Everybody cleared the school and i ran to lock the door and began to search the teachers desk for a miracle like the one I found in Calculus. What I found was located inside the teacher's briefcase ... A final exam but it was dated from August so the teacher must have last taught Chemistry in summer school the same time I had been in Calculus. In fact, there were a few of them all identical stuffed into a brown folder. As well, sitting there was the test that was scheduled for the following Monday and there was no way I could copy all the questions from both.
I folded and shoved the final exam down my pants and wrote feverishly fast all the questions I could from the test. I heard sirens outside the window and was begging for the emergency to be a real fire so I could get all the questions copied over. As it turned out, I had time to spare ... only if I didn't risk trying to copy out the much longer final exam.
Keeping the final exam in my pants I escaped unnoticed but feared he would announce back in class that there was a missing final exam copy stolen from his briefcase. He never noticed.
This time I simply confessed to my dad what I had done. Even if he sat down and tried to teach me what a mole was all night long the next day it'd still be the thing under Ronda Rousey's left eye. Yes I'm skipping time periods there but other than the Austin Power's GoldMember movie can you think of somebody else with a more recognizable mole?
Answering Chemistry test and exam questions for 3 hours is a delightful evening of fun for my dad so at the same table I studied for my next Accounting test while he wrote down the answers like he was doing kindergarten math. I knew all that evening that I had punched my ticket to University and I kept my head down and studied quietly but with a smile on my face.
Memorizing that test got me two things, a mark of 100% and a note to report to the principal's office. I played Ostrich and stuck my head in the ground refusing to go see the principal at the prescribed time and i don't know why but nothing more ever came of it. Maybe it was coincidental, maybe it wasn't that serious a meeting that had been scheduled, but for whatever reason my no-show went unnoticed and June along with it's final exams were upon me.
Before the first final exam ... Chemistry I received a letter in the mail from the University of Toronto.
It was an invitation to enroll in their Bachelor of Arts program with a full scholarship to Year 1 ... under the condition that i maintained my marks through to the end of the current semester.
I went into the Chemistry exam praying to all the schemer gods in the universe that the chemistry teacher was a lazy ass and he'd re present the same summer school exam as this years final exam.
The loudest stifled scream in the history of high school students has to be awarded to me for the moment I turned the exam over and saw every memorized question from the exam I had stolen I shrieked with joy inside my chest cavity.
I had done it.
Without remorse I answered every single Chemistry question perfectly thanks to dad and walked out of that exam knowing i had scored a perfect 100%.
Would it raise eyebrows? Certainly. Did I care? Not a single bit, I had used that high school to get me into university and now I was done with it.
There are no rules.
That's what I learned that year when I turned my life around dramatically. If you don't like the environment you are in ... get out. If you don't like the rules you have to work under ... make your own. Beg, borrow, lie, cheat, steal, ... do whatever it is you have to do to get where you have to go and if you feel guilty about it just recite Captain Kirk's line from Star Trek 3 ...
"the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many."
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