Slides That Follow Your Voice: Tamil Accent Memorial Tribute

Slide 1: Show Your Working

0:17Good evening. Thank you to the headmaster for asking me to speak, and thank you to everybody who has come, because it is a Tuesday and it is raining and he would have said that attendance is attendance. [chuckles]

0:30My name is Arun. I was in his class from nineteen ninety-six to ninety-seven, no, ninety-eight, which were the two years he taught mathematics to the ninth and tenth standard, and I am here because somebody from that class had to speak, and the others were cleverer than me at finding reasons not to.

0:48Mr Subramanian taught at this school for forty-one years. By the school's own count, he taught about three thousand eight hundred students, the headmaster says three thousand nine hundred, I will take his number, and I would say that every one of them can tell you where they were sitting when he first said, show me your working. Not the answer. The working. He did not care very much about the answer, really. He said the answer was for the examiner. The working was for you.

Slide 3: Three things, then I will sit down

1:18Let me tell you three things, and then I will sit down, because he also did not like long speeches, and he would be timing this. No? He would have laughed at that. Actually he would not have. He would have looked at the clock. Okay.

1:32The first thing. In nineteen ninety-seven I got thirty-four out of a hundred in a test on quadratic equations. I remember the number because he wrote it very small, in the corner, and then he wrote, in large letters across the whole page, the method is correct, you cannot add. And he was right. I could not add.

Slide 4: The first thing: 34 out of 100

1:53He made me sit with him for twenty minutes every day for three weeks, adding, nothing else, columns of numbers, like a child, and I was uh, humiliated, and at the end of the three weeks I could add, and I have never since, in twenty-seven years as an engineer, trusted a result I had not added myself. That is the first thing. The small number in the corner.

2:20The second, the notebook, the second thing. The second thing. He kept a notebook. One notebook, every year, with one line for every student, and the line was not a mark. It was something he had noticed. Daughter says this boy draws. This girl is afraid of the board, not of the sums.

Slide 5: The second thing: the notebook

2:40When he retired, in twenty nineteen, his daughter found forty-one notebooks in a steel cupboard, and she has given them to the school, and I have seen mine. It says, Arun, quick, careless, will be fine if somebody slows him down. I have shown it to my wife. She says it is the most accurate document about me that exists, document about me that exists. [laughs]

3:08She also asked whether the notebook said anything about my driving. It did not. He had not seen my driving. If he had, the line would be longer. I am getting away from the point. Where was I. The third thing.

Slide 6: The third thing: never said beautiful

3:21The third thing. He never once, in two years, told us that mathematics was beautiful. Other teachers said that. He said mathematics was useful, and that whether it was beautiful was for us to decide, not him, and then he would put up a proof so clean the room went quiet, and look at the clock, and say, next.

3:44He let us find it. He did not insist. [sighs]

3:49He was seventy-nine. He was teaching a neighbour's son, for free, the week before. The boy has sent a note, which the headmaster has, and which says only, sir told me to show my working, and I will. I think that is a better speech than mine. I had another paragraph here, about the cupboard, the steel cupboard, and I have decided not to read it. It is a cupboard. He would say, next.

Slide 7: Sir told me to show my working

4:16Thank you. Show your working.