"Don't say I looked like a schoolmarm," warned Mary O'Rourke as she stood before the blackboard in her department last night, pointing a stick at a map of the Government's new light rail plan.
The thought hadn't even entered our heads. Slow learners that we were, we were too busy trying to understand how the Government had both expanded the consultants' £500 million blueprint for an underground option and simultaneously lowered the cost to a mere £400 million.
But we were forgetting something. "£400 million plus!" corrected the schoolm - . . . er, the Minister, for the umpteenth time, trying to keep patience with such stupid pupils.
We kept forgetting that "plus", and the Minister kept having to correct us.
Not that the map makers hadn't tried to help. With slow learners in mind, the new Light Rail plan has been designed like a giant plus sign, with the arms intersecting at the bit where the line goes underground (never to be seen again, cynics predict).
But new maths wasn't the only difficult subject on the curriculum last night - there was geological studies as well. Few people know much about geological studies at the moment, but according to Ms O'Rourke we'll have between six and nine months of geological surveys to learn from, and we'll know all about it then.
In the meantime, she wasn't making any predictions about what might come up in the geological studies exams. But some experts are predicting that everything from fractured bedrock to Shergar could be down there, so the learning process may be a hard one.
The other problem many people had with the new plan last night was the apparent lack of a timetable. The Minister chided us for such pettiness - the effects of this would be with us when she and everybody in the room was long gone, she said.
That's what we were afraid of, we suggested. So the Minister tried another tack: like a good schoolteacher, she gave us a concrete example.
"I was a member of Westmeath County Council when we were deciding on a ring-road around Athlone. We set a time-frame for that and weren't we the sorry people."
All engineering is local, someone muttered. Then from the back of the classroom someone else suggested the new plan was a "sticking plaster decision."
The Minister laughed. "£400 million?" she said ("£400 million plus!" everybody thought). "It's a most amazing plaster if it is. I'd be happy to have them stuck all over my body."
