[Velvet]

The teacher I remember best was Mr Swanick, our high school math teacher. I fooled around in my second last year in high school and just managed to pass math. Mr Swanick taught the final year of math at our high school. The criteria for entering engineering at my chosen university was high A plus. Mr Swanick did not want me to enroll in his classes as he said I would fail and I had to ask the principal to over rule him. I was allowed to take his math class but Mr Swanick seemed to hate me after that. Every time I asked for clarification of how an equation was solved he would humiliate me, “And 1 plus 2 is 3. Do you follow that?”

We had two 40 minute periods back to back, one for Calculus and one for Probability and he would stay in the class for all of 5 minutes. He would write an equation on the board and solve it. Woe be on to you if you asked him a question! He put the assigned homework on the board, then left for the staff room for 75 minutes. The class had 16 students of which 2 were girls. We all got together and each if us took a math question from our textbook and solved it on the board with everyone helping. The final exams were not set by the school and we all wanted to go to university. All 16 of us passed, only one did not get an A in the math exams. All of us, all 16 went on to university.

I thank Mr Swanick, he gave me motivation to prove him wrong.