Even though we skipped Classes, We still came out with classics!! An encounter with my former secondary school teacher on my way to lectures.
With a big pride, this was what I said to my former mathematics teacher, but he didn’t hear it because it wasn’t for him.
Mr. Razak was my mathematics teacher in secondary school. For someone who is not a fan of memorizing stuff, especially formulas, I was never part of Mr. Razak’s good books and neither was he ever in mine.
Perhaps it’s some kind of illness. I find it very difficult to remember stuff, even the names of people. If you tell me your names, give me five to ten minutes, and anticipate a shocking memory loss, I’ll forget everything. And I don’t even do this on purpose, it’s pure amnesia😭
Because of this memory loss factor, I was always lazy with mathematics. To me, a mathematical formula remains a big misery. I and mathematics was a complete oxymoron. Even today I don’t like doing maths except it’s about money.
On the other hand, I was doing incredibly well in all the other subjects. Literature was my favorite subject. The moment I flex my Shakespeare muscles in front of your girlfriend, she becomes mine. At times not immediately, but soon, you’ll have to look for another girlfriend.
Mr. Razak who was my form master and a maths teacher as well couldn’t understand why I could do very well in other subjects but his. To him, any student who didn’t find joy in solving difficult maths questions was merely lazy and had to be dealt with.
To escape Mr. Razak’s wrath and terror, I banked most of his classes. I would rather tell a lie and go spend the whole lesson hours in the dispensary alone than sit in Mr. Razak’s maths class. I did not like this man and he knew it. Well neither did he like me. He didn’t hate me though, I could tell. Just that our methods weren’t just compatible, and I being the student, suffered most of the consequences.
Two of my friends too were not favorites of Mr. Razak and we usually skipped his classes together. But despite skipping maths classes, we weren’t last in the exams. Our maths teacher never believed for once that our exam results were genuine. Although I usually marked our scripts himself, he believed we were doing some kind of exam malpractice and that one day our cups will be filled and we would be caught. To his dismay, this day that he anticipated so much came until we were done with his form and moved.
Several years later, it was my third year in the university, and one faithful day as I and my friends were on our way to an afternoon lecture we bumped into a man who was struggling so hard to ignite his motorbike. From the look of things, this motorbike has exhausted its life span. It has reached senescence but its owner was not ready to discard it, therefore it also decided to stress the hell out of him that day.
From the look of things, it was clear that his motorbike had no intention of sparking any time soon. We decided to give him a push, maybe this poor bike is feeling cold and a little push could do it some good.
We branched to lend him a hand and guess who it was? Our former maths teacher in secondary school. Mr. Razak was shocked to see us. This university is a very renowned institution and distinct from others, there’s no room here for any lazy folks. How did we end up here? There were so many plot holes to figure out but no time for all that. There’s a motorbike here we had to spark and a lecture to catch.
After exchanging warm pleasantries with our old friend, we got into business. We push the bike for almost ten minutes but no positive result came from it. We stop for a while and talked about ourselves and what we were reading at the university. Ali a friend of mine who was an agricultural mechanic engineering student suggested that we hot wire the bike, Mr. Razak agreed and he got down to work and a few minutes into it, the old bike finally ignited.
Apparently, Mr. Razak also left our school a year after us. He did some top-up studies and he had been appointed to the economics department as a junior lecturer. None of us were reading economics so we were not bothered. He was happy to see us and so were we.
Minutes into our conversation, Mr. Razak couldn’t resist but asked the question he had been wanting to ask since our encounter, HOW DID YOU GET HERE? Well, even though we skipped classes, we still graduated with classics. I answered, but it wasn’t for him so I didn’t hear. It was just a thought in my head and a little food for my ego.
What he saw was me wearing a smile bigger than my face. That was the answer he got from me as we headed towards the way to our lecture hall whilst he rode off.