Who serried those ranks, I cannot tell you. What serrying involves, I cannot tell you either. Nor yet can I name you anything serriable other than ranks.
Within those ranks are tertiary students, whose heads and shoulders I can see but the rest of whom I have to take on trust because they are concealed behind the desks that form the serried ranks.
They have come for a course called Advanced Writing Skills.
I did not want to call it Advanced Writing Skills. I wanted to call it Writing but people who know about these things thought that unlikely to attract enough students for it to go ahead.
It is a summer school course and the students are attending because they are passionate about the English language, or because they yearn to express themselves with the clarity of mountain water, or because it looks like easy points to finish off their degree.
After which they will set out on a lifelong quest to pay off their student loans, poor things.
On the bench in front of me is an impressive range of electronic stuff, which theoretically enables me to project on to a screen behind me almost anything.
From time to time I invite one of the young people to come down to the front desk to make it work. They do not seem surprised. They are familiar with a teaching generation that lies on the far side of the technological divide.
But there has always been a gulf of some sort between teacher and taught. Who was the teacher that said the young had lost all respect for their elders and no longer stood up on buses to offer them a seat? I think it may have been Socrates.
I have good stuff prepared this morning. It wasn’t always so.
Last century, when I would teach five classes a day, I did most of them on the fly. In this I resembled a former colleague who was once asked by an inspector for his lesson plans. He declined the invitation but offered to show the inspector where he made those lesson plans.
"Very well," said the inspector, "show me," and Gren took him down the corridor and across the quad and up the stairs into the English block and stopped about a yard from the door of his classroom and said "normally about here."
"Has anyone seen my water bottle?" I say. No longer used to teaching I find I have to moisten the vocal cords to keep the voice alive throughout a two-hour session.
I brought a bottle yesterday and left it on the bench of technology. Janitors appear to have removed it.
The students tell me there’s a vending machine in the foyer. I say I haven’t cash.
The students laugh. The machine takes credit cards, or debit cards, or cellphones or anything in this interconnected world, except cash. A student comes with me to show me how to make it work.
Behind its clear glass door are serried ranks of stuff, the same confectionery and chips and fizzy drinks as are available to buy on every continent on earth, all brightly wrapped and gleaming lit.
On the bottom rank are branded bottles of water, each topped with a baby’s teat, at $4.50 a pop. Ah well, I’ll keep refilling the bottle.
The student shows me how to wave my credit card across a gizmo, and lo the glass door swings open.
The Aladdin’s Cave of stuff stands defenceless before my plundering hands.
"But I could take everything," I say.
The student all but pats me on the head. "The machine would know," she says, "and it would charge your credit card accordingly."
I take my expensive bottle of water. The glass door shuts. I go back into class and I explain to 40 youngsters that I have just beheld a wonder of technology. They laugh.
Then I suggest that it may also be a metaphor for the world they are about to go forth into, a world where new technology appears to offer everything. But at a cost.
They laugh a little less at that.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
