It is almost a cliché to say that everyone had a favourite teacher who left a positive impression on them. Cliché or not, I can boast no less than three such teachers who did just that and to this day, I hold them in high regards and esteem.
The three teachers came into my life in a five-year spell between the ages of 14 and; not the best time of one’s life, busy dealing with the raging hormones of adolescence. The three gentlemen were quite different personalities, nevertheless, they had a few things in common. They were all mathematics teachers. They had very dry sense of humour, they did not suffer fools gladly, and they were charismatic, even by the judgment of students who did not care much for maths. When they walked into the classroom, everyone stopped talking and turned around to listen to what they had to say. Many of their fellow teachers could never command the respect of the classroom with the same ease as those three.
I could write pages and pages about each teacher but, suffice it to say that for me to have three maths teachers as role models is somewhat strange since I don’t consider myself as a mathematician; I just loved, and still do, love maths largely due to those men. Here is a summary of my experience with each one of them.
Mr. Nabil Al Bishtawi, pictured above in more recent times, taught me maths at prep school for three years. He was a slight man with introverted personality who hardly ever smiled, much less laughed. He had a rotational duty of keeping over 200 rowdy young teenagers under control once every two weeks or so. In spite of his fragile look, Mr. Nabil was the most effective teacher at keeping the entire school under discipline; only having minor problems with the youngest group who were new to the school and did not know him well. Contrary to common practice at the time, he never shouted, carried a cane, slapped or kicked, as means of control adopted by pretty much all teachers. Early in my first year at the school, my class was making a great deal of noise unable to settle down after the lunch break; we probably had a collective sugar rush or something. Mr. Nabil walked into the class and looked around. We all ignored him and carried on with our raucous behaviour. But he stood his ground and waited. Out of curiosity, one by one, we settled down and took our seats. He said, ‘I am seeing you tomorrow morning for your first maths class, and I promise you a lesson you will never forget’. With that he left the room and the teacher who was supposed to be taking charge of our next lesson walked into a room-full of boys who did not quite understand why the new maths teacher just said a few words without punishing any of us but left with a weird promise of a memorable lesson. It is fair to say, we were not much impressed and soon turned our attention to being rowdy young teenagers.
The next morning, Mr. Nabil walked in, picked up a white chalk and drew a perfect circle free hand. We all ‘oohed’ at his party trick. He then drew a perfect square around the circle where the four sides of the square touched four points on the circle. We ‘oohed’ some more! Some of us had heard of his legendary ability to produce perfect geometrical shapes free hand and we were duly impressed that he gave us an early demonstration of this talent. Our delight was short lived! Mr. Nabil said: ‘this is a snap exam and it goes towards your final yearly average. If you fail to answer the question I am about to ask, you may as well forget about passing maths for the whole year. The question is this: assuming each side of the square is 10 centimeters, what is the size of the area in the square not covered by the circle? You have the rest of today’s lesson to submit your reply’.
I felt physically sick and looked around the classroom to discover that I was perhaps in a better shape than most of the other students. The boys who were reasonably good at maths had no idea how to go about giving an answer. The rest of the class did not understand a word he had uttered; he might as well had been speaking in Swahili. Of course, he already knew we stood no chance but, he had promised to teach us a lesson the day before, and he was as good as his promise. We raised objections like: ‘we did not do this in the class before’, ‘you did not tell us we are having an exam in our first lesson with you’, ‘that’s not fair!’, and dozens of other equally futile protestations. Mr. Nabil sat down at his desk having proved the other legend about him; that when he punished, he never resorted to physical punishment, preferring to destroy you psychologically instead. At the bell, he collected our papers and left the room. We were all red-faced, angry, confused and generally feeling sorry for ourselves. We checked with each other and no one had given a full answer. Some submitted a blank piece of paper with only their names on it. I too was confused but, I was full of admiration for him because he could draw perfect regular shapes and for putting the fear of god in us from the first lesson. For my part, I submitted the area of the overall square and almost got the area of the circle inside when the bell rang. I hastily wrote that I intended to subtract one from the other to give the answer.
From that day, none of us ever dared disrespect him or behave in anyway other than total attention when he spoke. When he cared to speak, he explained a topic like geometry, ratios, quadratic equations, with passion and mastery of the subject; he had a way of making you understand maths beyond formulae, ratios and notations. This was when we realised we were in the presence of an exceptional teacher, maths or otherwise, who made the subject accessible and understandable, even to those who truly hated the topic; they just performed better than they thought they otherwise might.
Whenever I had a difficulty with a topic, I would go and ask Mr. Nabil for guidance. He gave me enough information to put me on the right track but, he never made it easy by giving me the answer in full to save both of us a lot of time and effort. I have no doubt in my mind that Mr. Nabil was responsible for making me fall in love with mathematics and I carried on with this love to my senior years at secondary school where I met the next brilliant maths teacher; Mr. Ali Khalil Hamad.
Mr. Ali had a reputation that went before him too. Older students spoke with reverence of a man who was funny but never smiled, very knowledgeable but never cared to flaunt it, slow in delivery but effective in communicating his topic. Above all, he was reputed to have fallen out with his Maths professor at Cairo University for winning a mathematical argument against him. Mr. Ali had intended to carry on with his academic studies to PhD level but the professor told him he would be turned down and that he was lucky to even get a BSc. Degree. The world of Maths loss was the gain of our secondary school.
I was intrigued but did not expect to be in awe of him the way I was with Mr. Nabil. However, I wanted to know what went down at Cairo University a few years earlier to have made his professor resent him so much; there was a human story there waiting to be explored.
On the first day at secondary school, teachers walked in, introduced themselves and from the word go, attempted to establish a hierarchy, with them on top, reminding us all that within 3 years we would be sitting our ‘matriculation exams’ that would define our future thereafter. If we wanted to excel and make something of ourselves, we had better start acting as grown ups and forget about our juvenile behaviour in earlier years. Veteran teachers went as far as asking us to stand and give our full names. What mattered to them was not the student first name, rather his family name. From that they would confirm who the father might be, what they did for living and if we had older siblings who attended the school in previous years. I was looked upon favourably because my brother Tawfik had attended the same school four years earlier and he had a reputation for being disciplined, serious and a good student. The veteran teachers said that I had big shoes to fill and I had better make sure I behaved as well as my elder brother. I did not care much for that advice.
By contrast, Mr. Ali walked into the classroom, picked up the white chalk and with a few random lines on the board, dragged us all from our two-dimensional view of maths to the more complex, yet intriguing world of three-dimensions. He urged us to think of the blackboard as open space and the funny rhombus-shapes he drew, were actually regular square and rectangular planes seen in a 3-D perspective. He spoke non-stop for 40 minutes wiping the blackboard before we had a chance to copy down what he was saying and creating more shapes intersecting, in parallel and touching tangentially. Every now and again, one of us would raise his hand to ask a question but he ignored the signals, pressing on as though he had a bus to catch. It was a fascinating, enjoyable and headache inducing first lesson. When the bell rang, he dropped the chalk and walked out of the class to see if the bus was still there waiting for him.
For the next two years, he delivered regular master classes, he threw funny lines and carried on without cracking a single smile. He got to know each and every one of us very well. Not as human beings, but as maths-beings. I was one of three, maybe four best students; we formed a ‘maths friendship club’ and competed with one another mercilessly. We all idolised Mr. Ali and we wanted to do well to please him; if only he would give us a sign that he was pleased.
We often discussed his story at Cairo University and wondered what had actually happened. Was there a falling out or was the half-baked story just an urban legend imagined by previous senior students? We needed to know! Our chance came thanks to the Israeli occupying forces who imposed a limited curfew on the neighbourhood where our school was, in order to find and apprehend a freedom-fighter/ terrorist individual on the run. So, we were all stuck in our classes waiting for the curfew to be lifted so we could go home. Mr. Ali happened to be the teacher with us that afternoon. The formal class ended and he said we could fill our time by asking him questions about any maths topic we needed clarification on. Many students asked questions and he did his best to explain and clarify. I had no technical questions as such so, decided to go all out and run a risk of upsetting him by asking a personal question. He noticed my hand raised and said ‘yes Mufid, what is your question?’ ‘Is it true Mr. Ali that you famously had an argument with your Maths professor at university and that you won the argument?’ There was a period of silence in the classroom while Mr. Ali considered the question; it couldn’t have been more than 15 seconds but seemed like 15 years. Everyone was looking at me with hatred and contempt for spoiling a perfectly good rapport with a brilliant, albeit miserable teacher. I agreed with them, I thought even for me, with my the-devil-may-take-care attitude, felt I might have gone too far on that occasion. My way of showing I was chastened by my reckless behaviour, I stood my ground and stared him in the face, daring him to say something; good, bad or indifferent. Finally, we all experienced a new sensation: Mr. Ali smiled very broadly, showing most of his teeth. I wasn’t sure if he was smiling or just baring his teeth ready to rip me apart. Mr. Ali said: ‘yes, it is true, he was an idiot professor’. It was inevitable that the entire class wanted to know what the mathematical argument was all about. I did not stand a chance of getting my supplementary question because they all out-shouted me begging him to explain. Apparently, Mr. Ali disagreed with the professor who subscribed to the normal convention of believing that parallel lines never met. Young Mr. Ali said they did. After a few exchanges, the professor invited his brilliant undergraduate student to come in front of the class and prove his theorem, promising to debunk it in two minutes flat. Mr. Ali stood up, went to the board, drew two parallel lines, and began to explain his proposition, concluding that two parallel lines would actually meet at ‘Infinity’. His fellow undergraduates laughed and cheered, the professor did neither and took it as a personal insult and challenge to his authority. Mr. Ali just about got his degree and returned home for a life of secondary school teacherhood.
Like all the others, I was impressed. I also wanted to carry on studying, go to university then run into a professor of any subject and make a fool of them in front of the class. Not being clever enough, original enough or driven enough, I never had the chance to come anywhere near such an adventure.
The third and final teacher was Dr Hunt at Cornwall Technical College (now part of the Cornwall College Group). With rugged looks, chiseled chin, and always immaculate in appearance, Dr Hunt could have been a movie star. He taught pure and applied maths to A-Level students and I was lucky enough to prepare for my A-Levels under his tutelage. Again, Dr Hunt hardly ever smiled as he thought there was nothing funny about maths and if there was, no teenage student was going to come up with a satirical angle to impress him. In fact, very little impressed Dr Hunt that any of us could come up with. However, we had always been able to disappoint him with our slowness to grasp mathematical concepts he thought were obvious.
My introduction to Dr Hunt had all the potential to turn out to be the biggest disaster of my burgeoning academic career. A-Levels covered two academic years from September to June. For all kinds of reasons, I and two other compatriots arrived in Cornwall four months late for the start of the academic year. Cornwall, is the southern most land mass of the British Isles that forms the South West panhandle. Dr Hunt wasn’t sure we could make up the lost time but the head of the college, Dr Olds convinced him to give us a try by assigning a retired teacher to give us extra lessons to make up for the term we had missed.
On the first day back from the Christmas break, I and my two compatriots joined the other students for the first maths class of Term Two. Everyone was excited to reunite and relate their adventures over the Christmas holiday. Nobody knew us then so, they duly ignored us and we were happy to be ignored so we could worry about our already limited prospects in peace. Dr Hunt walked in and the moment his head floated into the room; silence descended as though someone turned the mute button on. Dr Hunt said He would like to get a sense of how much everyone had absorbed from ‘Term One’ by giving us a snap test. There were the obligatory complaints like: ‘Oh Sir’ and ‘you didn’t give us a warning’ and so on; reminiscent of a few years earlier when Mr. Nabil pulled a similar stunt as a punishment, rather than an assessment. Dr Hunt wrote three simple questions asking us to provide answers. The questions were: 1) What is zero raised to the power of zero? 2) What is the numerical value of zero factorial? 3) What is ‘’n” divided by zero, where “n” is any integer number? He too asked us to submit our answers with explanations by the end of the period. The questions were horrible! No one in the class had the slightest idea what he was playing at; how can you raise nothing to the power of nothing? Factorial makes sense when you have a meaty number like 6 or 10 or 200, but not zero! The third question also didn’t make sense but I remembered reading about it before so I felt I could give it a go. I also attempted the other two questions but I wasn’t really confident of what I was doing and seriously thought I had reached my mathematical limitations. I wondered if it was wise of me to have chosen Maths as a subject to prepare for university.
At the end of the period, Dr Hunt asked us to file by his desk and drop our answer sheets, which we duly did and left. My two friends and I discussed the test, we concluded we messed up spectacularly and we were likely to be the laughing stock of the Cornish students when Dr Hunt gave out the results of the test. We wondered if we would be asked to drop out of the course and return home with our mathematical tails between our legs.
The following day after lunch, Dr Hunt arrived to give us the first afternoon class. He proposed to give us the test results and discuss the three questions in more details. No one seemed enthused by the idea but, we had no choice in the matter. Dr Hunt pulled out a small piece of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket and said: ‘I will give the results in the order of marks out of 75 scored by each student’. He started out as follows: ‘Sukkar – 40; Yaish – 35; Sawalha – 33’; and so on until the last student: Bennet – Minus 10. Having my name read out first, I assumed I scored the lowest mark and from that point onwards, I stopped listening and contemplated dropping out and going home that very afternoon. However, Giries Sawalha, who was the most fluent in English amongst the three of us, turned to me and said: ‘you scored the highest mark, followed by us two!’ I asked: ‘how is that possible, I scored 40 out of 75, I had never scored below 90% in maths’. At this point, Bennett asked how he could have scored below zero, surely there was a mistake. Dr Hunt confirmed there was a mistake, Bennett had submitted nonsensical answers and omitted to write his name on the answer paper so, he dropped below zero for not even getting his own name right. We all laughed, including Bennett, but not Dr Hunt.
Needless to say, the three of us were overwhelmed with excitement for coming up top on our first day and were certain the boys at the college would seek our friendship and the girls would demand our genes. Sadly, neither of these predictions came true! A few days later, I bumped into Dr Hunt who told me that had I used my imagination a little more, I might have scored higher. He deflated me further by saying that, strictly speaking, I gave wrong answers to all three questions but, I was less wrong than the rest of the class.
Over the next 18 months, I got to know Dr Hunt better and learnt a great deal from this miserable, movie-star-looking man who communicated his love of a subject so well and so effectively, without resorting to drama or over-use of his authority. Thanks to him and his guidance, I managed to get straight As in Maths and Further Maths, which helped me secure a place at university.
Returning to my last days before coming to England, there was an annual matriculation results’ ritual observed by the entire community. The results would be released during the month of July. The entire country awaited these results as they were the major determinant of whether or not a student stood a chance of gaining a place at one university or another, and what choice of subjects was open to him/her. Results would be published in the newspapers, and announced on the radio in a style less interesting than reading a telephone directory. However, every household, whether they had a matriculation student or not, would either buy the papers, listen to the radio announcements, or do both. For days thereafter, hundreds of phone calls would be made to congratulate or commiserate with students and their families, with analysis conducted ‘ad nauseam’ .
Days before I was due to receive my final results, my entire extended family as well as our wide circle of friends took the optimistic assumption that I would pass but were speculating whether my overall average would be good enough to gain me a place at a prestigious university in the Middle East. Personally, I was indifferent to the whole drama because I never wanted to go to university anywhere in the Middle East, preferring to go either to the USA or the UK but, my father disabused me of such a notion over the previous two years.
The results were due to be published on the Sunday however, two days prior, we had family visitors from Jerusalem and we had just finished lunch when the phone in the hallway rang. My mother answered it and called out to me to come to the phone. Redundantly, my father asked me: ‘who is the idiot calling you at the weekend?’ I said I didn’t know. So, I went to the phone and had this brief conversation:
– Hello?
– Mufid?
– Yes, who is this?
– Nabil, I have your final results, you did very well, congratulations
– How do you know?
– I am one of the auditors of the final results and I looked your results up
– Sorry, who are you exactly?
– I am Nabil Bishtawi, your maths teacher from preparatory school!
– Why did you look my results up?
– Because I care. Good luck for the future.
Mr. Nabil hung up and I stood fixed to the spot trying to work out what had just happened. My analysis was rudely interrupted by my father shouting from the guest room to “tell us who was on the phone and what did they want”. I suddenly realised I never thanked Mr. Nabil before he hung up.
Many years later, I still look up to those three teachers and lament my negligence to keep in touch with them, even to just say thank you. Now that they have all passed away, with Mr Nabil the last to do so, I will always regret the missed opportunity to let them know how much they helped shape my way of thinking.
Who knows, maybe dead people trawl the internet and read blogs. If they do, Mr. Nabil, Mr. Ali and Dr Hunt, thank you for shining a light on the most fascinating of subjects; thank you for letting me into your world of mystery of maths; thank you for helping me climb up the academic ladder; and thank you for showing me how to conduct myself with dignity and integrity. May you rest in peace.
Mufid
