In an attempt to capitalize on the ongoing construction on McTavish, the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) is rolling out a brand new MiniCourse: Campus Parkour. The course promises to be an exciting opportunity for both thrill-seekers and students just trying to get to class on time.
The course has been in development since this year’s McTavish construction project began, when Earl Paxton, McGill alumnus and parkour aficionado, pitched the idea to SSMU. Paxton was inspired in part by his own experience as a self-employed parkour teacher, but also by a preexisting university workshop on student safety when navigating campus constriction sites.
“I thought the safety thing was great because McTavish really is a danger-zone right now,” Paxton said. “But then I was like, why bother with safety, when we could teach students how to get through that danger-zone in, like, the sickest ways possible?”
The MiniCourse will cover the three J’s of parkour–jumping off of stuff, jogging unnecessarily, and ‘just doing it’–and teach students to apply them specifically to McTavish terrain. Example exercises include free-climbing the fences around construction zones, backflipping off of moving bulldozers, and successfully scaling the metal staircase currently in place outside the Brown Building.
Much like McTavish itself, developing the course has been an uphill and rocky process. SSMU initially rejected Paxton’s pitch unanimously, out of student safety and liability concerns, but when the construction safety workshops folded due to insufficient funding, Paxton’s parkour training was considered as a less expensive alternative.
“It’s not about the money, though,” Megan Green, SSMU representative, promised in a statement to /The Tribune/. “It’s about the fun. Who doesn’t want to learn parkour?”
Neither Green nor Paxton commented on early interest polling, which revealed that 89 per cent of students “had little to no interest” in learning parkour.
Even after getting off the ground, the course faced setbacks. An early trial course landed one participant in the hospital, after attempting a pretty sweet 360 jump from the top flight of the metal stairs to the SSMU entrance.
The incident could have shut the project down altogether. However, it was later found that the student, who suffered a broken collarbone and two fractured wrists, was not actually participating in the course—he was just running late for a midterm.
Registration for the MiniCourse opens next month, and will remain open as long as McTavish construction continues.
This article is a work of satire and is part of the joke issue.
