By Carol Orlock Illustration by Tim Braun ■ sat in the faculty Lounge and tried, fo r the third time, to read the paper in fron t of me. ASSIGNMENT #3. WEEDEMAN, JOnly the heading was legible. The rest, scribbled downhill in thick pencil, might have been worth an A in an art class, but not here. My gradebook showed a shaky B and a surer C for Weedeman’s first two assignments. He occupied Row 4, Seat 2 and a place of fear in my mind. Would he become my spring term nemesis? I had gotten the first hint he might be Composition 101’s Lesson Plan Thief only an hour before. “ Now you know the parts of speech,” I summarized. “You tell me. which are the most important? Which did you learn first as a kid? Which should you use primarily in your writing?” It was a question strategically formulated to hang unanswered in Room 208’s air until the following Tuesday. “ How about it?” I pushed. “ Nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions? Lots of little conjunctions, maybe?” Iwould begin the next class here. I shut my notes, but I heard a noise to my right, like air being drawn across spittle. “Yes?” “ Nouns. Nouns and verbs.” I tried a dubious glance. That only made him start laying out his flawless logic. I cut it off with curt thanks, the others looked sufficiently puzzled to protect my next lecture from revision. Weedeman’s high nasal voice hung suspended in mid-sentence, disapproving the speed with which the classroom emptied. MOST TEACHING ACT IV ITY IS PROMPTED BY AN UNREASONED FEAR OF STUDENTS. I’d had a calligrapher inscribe that on handmade paper. I planned to mount it on my office door, but it remained on the inside flap of my briefcase, accusing me from the other side of the table. My own unreasoned fear was of a Lesson Plan Thief. Occasionally such a student surfaced. No sooner would I pose my first query than one uncanny mind could unravel my entire outline, a logical structure I had erected to flesh out 75 minutes. Weedeman, J. A Lesson Plan Thief? His scribbles, crossing and recrossing the thin blue lines on Assignment #3 offered no clue. Raw intelligence might allow these chunks of grammar, looking as if they had been bitten off by that high nasal voice, chewed and spit back onto the page tangled as celery strings. I couldn’t pinpoint it. A vision of a pencil, probably Weedeman’s, floated p a s t - yellow shaft damaged by beaver incursions, its point knife-sharpened to a chunky edge, and, at the upper tip, the eraser mauled and gray as chewed gum. Halfway down Assignment #3 I gave up and entered another C. The next student’s paper was typewritten with only a bad complexion of strikeovers. I polished that one off, worth a B, and plunged into the remaining essays. eturning papers a week later, I took note of who collected for Row 4, Seat 2. It was Weedeman all right, and bearing more than a casual resemblance to his pencil. During the next hour I proselytized on the importance of nouns and verbs, and I studied him. Weedeman looked everything his handwriting implied. A thin reed of bony flesh shouched over the desk frame, his right leg a log cut to fall across the aisle. His elbow and wrist joints were huge and rude as doorknobs. Dishwater hair stuck out, a fringe some playful child had taken scissors to. Below the fringe, his cheekbones would have done any John Steinbeck page proud, and they were matched by an angular sloping jawbone and deep eyesockets. A sallow, nearly waxen complexion gessoed the composition’s surface and his skin looked like that of children one instinctively wants to wash. I recognized the ashen legacy of poor nutrition, and, in his eyes, which were huge behind cokebottle lenses, I saw all the dusky distraction of a fish. Those eyes tracked my laps around the front of the room. Weedeman, J. took no notes. Reassuringly, neither did he rise to any questions. He watched the others nibble through my questions. I had the sense he let them swallow the chum I threw, waiting to see which piece held the hook. Finally, toward the hour’s close, I cast correctly. “ The rules we’ve been talking about come together under the name ‘syntax.’ ” I picked up chalk and printed. “ Remember when we learned the meaning for part of this word? What does the root SYN mean?” “ Together. Symmetry. . .symbol, synthesis,” a freshman in the front row replied. “ Together. All right, what would the TAX portion mean, considering what we’ve learned? Anybody take zoology? Study taxis? Taxonomy? How about it?" Twenty-eight neatly synchron ized glances found fascination in desk top graffiti and the linoleum’s pattern. The door got sidelong glances. My gaze skimmed the room and caught a glint off the deep pond at Row 4, Seat 2. “ Mr. Weedeman?” “Well, if the SYN part is together, and all those rules make the sentence logical, then the TAX part must be something about putting together in the right way.” “ Precisely.” I wrote the Latin root— TAXIS—next to my diagramming. “ Taxis means order. SYN plus TAX, together with order. The right words in the right order, remember? Okay, write Paper Four. And don ’ t take any wooden syntaxis.” Clinton St. Quarterly 27
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