Maths Teachers through the Ages

We just passed the Teacher’s day where all bloggers were out paying their tributes to teachers who transformed their lives. I have had more own share of inspirational teachers from as varied fields of study as English, Physics and History. But strangely no mathematics teacher seems to figure in the list though many of the others’ favorite teachers seem to hail from this discipline. So I thought I would take a sojourn down my memory lane in quest for that elusive inspirational teacher of numbers.

In my first three years of education, teachers were generalists who single handedly initiated toddlers fresh out of their diapers into the education system. The only thing about mathematics I remember from this period was my mother receiving complaints about how I was challenging the spatial orientation of numbers. But the teacher apparently was not too impressed with what she called the sleeping ones.

Then I shifted to a new school in God’s own country for my second standard. All I remember from that time is that the teacher had set a prize for the person who score 100% in marks – a cool looking eraser I had my eyes set on. Since I do not carry any recollection of ever being in possession of the said object, it is conceivable I never managed that feat.

I was back to what was then a retirees’ paradise and now India’s answer to Silicon Valley for my next two years. All I remember from this period is a Malayali Christian Math’s teacher who was the class teacher as well in my third standard with who my mother had managed to strike a friendship. Of the subject as such or the teacher during my fourth standard I carry no recollection whatsoever. For my Fifth standard I moved on to a different school – here the teacher’s cane managed to find an indelible place in my memory that the teacher could not. I still vividly remember that shabby cane she would bring probably plucked from the trees on the roadside unlike those smooth pliable art pieces that the masters carried to ply their craft upon errant students’ posteriors. Talk of gender discrimination!

In sixth standard I encountered the first memorable teacher. And she did take a personal interest in me as well. But the interest had more to do with my social skills than my mathematical skills. Or rather the lack of it! She would keep wondering how my mother with such a nice smiling face would have a son with such a dark gloomy face as if the word’s burdens rested on his shoulders. Probably she was not aware genes get inherited from both one’s father as well as one’s mother. Or it could be just that she assumed a woman with a smiling face would have married a man with a smiling face? But all in all she was a nice grandmotherly lady whose very positive aura gave a pleasant feel to the mathematics classes. However the teacher next year made up for the same with her unpleasant negative aura which is all I remember about her.

For my eighth standard I moved down south to the land of temples. There I managed to run afoul of a popular mathematics teacher – again thanks to my social skills. This time my outraged reaction to a perceived injustice lead to my earning an epithet for impertinence. The teacher during the ninth and tenth made her presence felt by her constant absence. That suited me pretty well and I managed to secure 95% in my board exams.

Moving on to my eleventh and twelfth, we had a teacher whose claim to fame was more non mathematical in nature – a book of poetry and a self-proclaimed sense of humor. My only interaction with him was at the end of the two years when he volubly expressed surprise regarding the loopholes in the IIT JEE system that allowed a complete dunce like me to penetrate through.

So that’s been my checkered history of relationship with Math’s teachers. I did have a brilliant teacher for my IIT preparation though. But then I am more a ‘do and learn’ person who tended to foray into the world of dreams while he would be expostulating brilliant solutions to high complex problems on the blackboard. Then there was this lady mathematician who offered me free coaching for Mathematics Olympiad based on my performance at a city level Mathawiz contest evaluated by her. But she was known to be a marionette with a reputation for flogging her students relentlessly in pursuit of mathematical excellence. I lacked the resolve and strength of heart to put up with her rigorous demands. My pragmatic parents also did not deem it necessary to put me through the ordeal for the sake of intellectual pursuits that did not have direct career implications.