Remembering David Sir

Full well they laugh’d with counterfeited glee,
At all his jokes, for many a joke had he:
Full well the busy whisper, circling round,
Convey’d the dismal tidings when he frown’d:
Yet he was kind; or if severe in aught,
The love he bore to learning was in fault.

The lines from Oliver Goldsmith’s , The Deserted Village, 1770 best represents what David Sir was to us in 1990s.

A strange start

It was a warm afternoon in march 1996. An angry looking boy walked into the staff room and accused the Tamil teacher, in front of the assembled staff, of favouritism and of leaking questions before the exam.

Consider what that requires in a Chennai school in 1996. Not courage. It was the absence of the ordinary calculation that stops a fifteen year old from doing such a thing. No thought of consequence. No respect for authority, and certainly none of the cultural reverence towards teachers that everybody around me had absorbed without effort and I had somehow failed to absorb at all. I said what I believed was true, loudly, in the worst possible room, to the worst possible audience.

That was David Sir’s first sight of me. I did not know he was there. I did not know for a long time afterwards. He told me himself, much later, when he asked me what had made me confront a teacher in front of everyone.

Every teacher in that room had all the information required to write me off, and writing me off was the reasonable thing to do. Any other teacher would not have taken me into his ranks.

He did. He taught me physics for the next two years and shaped my love for science.

His unique style

He had a style I have not seen since.

He was at home in Tamil and in English, and he moved between them without the seam showing. He could explain Newton’s laws in Tamil. Not translate them, which is a lesser act. Explain them, in the language in which I argued with my mother and lost my temper and told jokes, which meant the laws stopped being an examination subject imported from somewhere else and became a description of the room I was sitting in.

He did not teach what was in the textbook. The textbook was a compression of physics into things that could be marked, and he treated it as such. He taught the basis of the thing instead. He would not let an answer stand as an answer. He made us go under it, and under that, until we hit the floor of what was actually being claimed.

Different students took different things out of that classroom. Some took marks. Some took an entrance examination result. I took the only thing I was in a condition to take, which was a permanent interest in how the world works. I did not care whether I finished first or last. I knew I had understood something, and the understanding was not a transaction with an examiner.

There was a quality in those explanations I still struggle to name honestly, because the honest word for it has been colonised by people I have spent my adult life arguing against. The nearest I can get without lying is this. The universe he described was not decorated. It was simply larger than I had known, and it was consistent, it was transcendent and it did not care what I wanted it to be. That is a stranger and better feeling than reverence, and I got it first from him.

Obedience and respect are two words that get blurred constantly, and the blur costs children a great deal. Obedience is behaviour. It is produced by consequence, and it lasts as long as the consequence is present. Respect is an assessment. It is produced by evidence, and it survives the absence of the person entirely. Most of the adults in my school life wanted the first and used the vocabulary of the second, and a boy who tests everything will find that out in about a week.

This is where his severity belongs, because it did not produce obedience and was never designed to. Severity aimed at a person is a consequence, and I had shrugged off every consequence offered to me that year, some of them considerably heavier than anything he brought. Severity aimed at a piece of lazy reasoning is evidence. It tells a boy that the man in front of him cares more about the answer being right than about being liked, and a boy who tests everything is watching for exactly that and almost never finds it.

I was brash, impertinent and cantankerous. I questioned everything, which sounds admirable written down and is exhausting to stand in front of five days a week. He did not brush me aside, and he did not try to break the habit either.

He is the first teacher I listened to. Not because he demanded it. He never once said a word about respect, which is the reliable signature of a man who has it. He put the evidence in front of me and let me reach the assessment myself, and I reached it, and it has not moved in thirty years. That was his singularity, and I have met very few adults since who understood the difference well enough to work with it.

The horizon he handed over

He was teaching a subject with a peculiar property. Almost nothing else offered to a sixteen year old carries that time signature.

The light arriving from a star has been travelling since before the classroom, the school, the city or the language existed. The proton in a hydrogen atom in a glass of water has been intact for something on the order of fourteen billion years, and no experiment has yet caught one decaying. The constants he was writing on the board in chalk held before the Earth condensed and will hold long after the last person who remembers him is gone.

Handing that frame to a child is not a small gift. It is the instrument I now use to keep my own writing from collapsing into self absorption, and I did not build it. It was installed in a government aided classroom in Chennai by a man with a piece of chalk.

I will not use it to say anything false about him now. The physics is not consoling. His atoms are not watching. Nothing is conserved except energy, and energy is indifferent to whose it was. What actually persists is smaller than a soul and larger than a memory. It is a causal chain. He altered what I attend to, and I have altered what my daughter attends to, and that chain runs forward through every student in every one of those classes, thinning as it goes, until it eventually runs out. That is the whole of it. It is also the largest effect a human being is permitted to have on the future, and most people never come close to it.

What I did not do

A person may employ a million people. A person may fund the building of schools. Only an educator reaches into someone and changes what they are capable of noticing, and that is a different order of act, and we do not price it accordingly.

David Sir did that for me. From everything I have heard since, he did it for a great many others.

And here is the part I would rather leave out. I never went back and told him. I had thirty years and the means to find him, and I know exactly what it would have been worth to a man who spent his working life on boys like me and received almost no evidence that any of it landed. I told other people about him often. I told him nothing. he essay is being written now because it can no longer be a phone call, and I am aware that this is the cheapest possible order in which to do it.

To his family, you knew the man at home and I only knew him for two hours a week in a hot room with the fans on. But I want you to have this on the record from a stranger with no reason to flatter anybody. He took on the most difficult boy available to him, at no advantage to himself, and he did not give up. The interest in science he put into me has outlasted the school, the city, the country and most of my other convictions.

He has passed to the ages. What he built in us has not.