In our first long quiz, he idealized the thermodynamic surfaces as simple geometric shapes and asked how the basic thermo- dynamic processes could be indicated on them. If you knew the answer, it was pure “child’s play,” to use his own expression. You could be done with the problem in a minute. If you didn’t know, then you could be scratching your head for an eternity. “If you know, you know. If you don’t, you don’t.” That was our conclusion about the answers to his quizzes. And isn’t that the very idea of a test? Furthermore, after one gets past the physics of his problems, the mathematics was very simple. As should be, his exams were about thermodynamics and not mathematics. And so, back to this first long quiz, which was supposed to run for an hour. I had studied very well and was done in about 15 minutes. (Would he not be your favorite if you were I?) I was debating with myself whether to already turn in my paper or not. I decided to submit. And when I did, I had to walk, as invisibly as I could, back toward the theater’s entrance, where the professor stood beside a very big brown cardboard box sitting on top of the armrest of a chair. He motioned for me to “shoot” my blue book into the box. As the blue book went in, he shouted at the top of his lungs, “One finished!” I could imagine that those words impaled many a fellow examinee’s heart. I was startled myself by the consequence of my action! I was told later that when the next one submitted his blue book, they heard “Two finished!” and so on in a crescendo of stress-inducing announcements. My classmates later pleaded with me to just please remain in my seat next time so we could all go home at the same time. The title “dean” alone instills awe. To have been considered a “terror” at the same time scales up the level of nervousness upon encounter. But as with many a professor in the UP College of Engineering who were considered as “terrors” by students,
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