The Seducer

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Bradley Cannon, professor of mathematics at Peermont College, stood at a west window of his classroom, his hands folded behind him at the base of his spine, and looked out upon a bright October day.

In this position, he could look either down a gentle slope of browning grass to a small grove of fruitful walnut trees or, by the simple maneuver of shifting slightly the focus of his eyes, at his class behind him in the reflective pane.

The room was caught and held in concentrated silence, for Brad had sprung upon his students in the last quarter hour of this particular session one of the terrifying pop quizzes for which he was justly infamous.

He found pop quizzes to be amusingly deceptive. You put one problem on the blackboard for solution, two at the most, and if a student missed a point or two, the penalty was, after all, quite slight, say three points deducted from a maximum of ten, and often the student would go on in this way until the end of the term, happy and comfortable in the delusion that he was doing well, and never realize until it was too late that three from ten on a basis of one hundred is seventy, which is damn near failing in any respectable class. Brad had seen many strong young characters disintegrate under the impact of this tardy and terrible understanding.

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