Free The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis Page B

candidate has no role whatsoever. I don’t even want to know.
    It is always late at night, without the daily campus travails to distract me, when the shadow of your absence falls most heavily upon me. I cannot escape it. I am immersed in it. The emptiness, the flatness of life without you, is stark and profound. Like a desert. What am I to do?
    AM

CHAPTER FOUR
    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 whichthe 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