What do Teachers Do?
(Or Systematic support vs. individual initiative)
I was an XIth student at KV Bhopal. Our maths teacher, Dubey Sir, had enrolled us in some maths competition on Sunday. He kept doing this. We asked why we should sacrifice the weekend. He replied “It will be good practice”. He always said the same thing. Practice for what? We did not know.
We arrived at the govt school venue. The classrooms had thatched roofs. In a pond nearby, buffaloes and children whiled the day away. The people running the exam did not have our names. They refused to let us in.
Twenty schoolboys told they did not have to write an exam. On a sunny weekend. When we have permission to be away from home for 3–4 hours. Obviously we want to play cricket. Luckily, there were some kids already playing in the school grounds. We chatted with them and inveigled ourselves into their game. Meanwhile, Dubey Sir furiously rushed off in a jeep. He had headed off to the home of the person who was in charge of all centers in Bhopal for that exam.
I dont know what arguments he made, but he brought the guy to the centre. Between his arguments and the official’s agreements, the people at the centre agreed to take our answer sheets and then deal with the paperwork later.
Then, came the hardest task for him. He had to get us away from the game and convince us to write the 3 hour exam. A 3 hour exam of which 2 hours had already elapsed.
From this 1 hour of work, three of us made it to the list of top 20 people in MP. The three of us were invited to Jabalpur to write the national level exams. National level of what? God knew but “Nationals” was a holy word, most literally because it gave you a holiday or several. The others who got into Nationals were hockey players, and it was quite a change to know that you could be in the Nationals even for Maths.
Only when we saw the label on the question paper I received in Jabalpur did I learn that I was writing something called the Indian National Mathematical Olympiad. I still am not fully convinced that I remember this correctly, but I remember one of the questions in the paper was
- x^n + y^n = z^n
- x, y, z, n are whole numbers. Prove that n <= 2.
Fermat’s last theorem! As one question among a set of 10. In this exam, I did ok again and landed at the national training camp in Bangalore at the “Tata Institute” (IISc). This was a training camp to select the Indian national team to the International Mathematical Olympiad. Now, unlike the Jabalpur competition this was not one day long, but one month long. In the summer between XI and XII where I was hoping to get a leg up on JEE preparation. This was quite a sacrifice. But my teacher and family encouraged me to go for it.
I ended up representing India once in Beijing and next year in Sigtuna, Sweden, where I won the Bronze Medal.
Today I got a friend request on Facebook from a 69-year old gentleman. I actually had to think a moment which 69 year old might want to befriend me. It was Dubey Sir.
Dubey Sir taught us Maths, but he also encouraged the weakest, he stretched the middling, and provoked the toppers. He would crack jokes amiably but would also give you zero marks if your equals signs did not align vertically. He would praise you if you got 50 when you used to get 40, while ridiculing 99 from those who should get 100. Most of all, he did everything possible to make sure you learnt Maths, you enjoyed Maths, removed every obstacle on your road.
