In form 6B , I sat in A' level math class for one term only. Actually, I dropped it before it dropped me. One of my so called friends suggested that I drop math because it was interfering with my extracurricular activities. But there was no truth to that rumour. In that one eventful term however, I got the opportunity to sit at the feet of the one and only Q.C. Edwards.
" QC ," as he w as affectionately called , was a living legend at KC. His fame was well known and he was held in very high esteem by all KC boys who did A' level math over the years. At the same time , his reputation had apparently spread to other schools. For example, in form 6B two brains from XLCR (Wilson and Gilpin) joined us. Under intense cross examination they explained that they had come to KC so that they could be taught mathematics by the great QC Edwards. (Wilson fell in love with the school so much that twenty years later he sent his son Andrew to KC. Andrew became head boy and was on the school challenge team in 2001-2002)
QC had a colossal presence in the classroom and he had such a way with words that we all felt that he would have made a brilliant English teacher as well. He had a lot of wit and with one sharp sentence he could put you down in such a manner that you never forgot it. On the other hand none of us ever got upset at him or felt that he had insulted us.
In maths class one afternoon, Vance Gardiner, the designated class talker for the past five years, was chatting away while QC was trying to teach the rest of us some calculus. QC glanced around briefly, recognized the guilty culprit, turned back to the blackboard and thundered, "Gardiner V, how much was it that you got in the last math test again? Was it thirty five percent?" That lone obscure statement of fact, hitherto known only to QC and Gardiner but now known to thirty others, completely floored the latter who never chatted in QC's classes again. Neither did the rest of us for that matter. After all, one did not relish the thought of QC telling the entire class how much one got in the last test.
On another occasion , just after the lunch break , QC walked in to start teaching only to see that one chap was still eating his lunch, which consisted of the ever popular bun and cheese with the box juice to wash it down. Without batting an eyelid QC said to the hungry chap, "the classroom was made for teaching, the canteen was made for eating, please leave!" He obviously was not the "no eating in the classroom," type of teacher. No, he had to add some colour to the language.
In the beginning , we felt that QC knew the sine, cosine and tangent of every angle. Mere mortals like us only knew the sine, cosine and tangent of thirty, sixty, ninety and one hundred and eighty degrees, whereas QC seemed to know the sine of such obscure angles as nineteen and eighty six degrees. We came to this amazing conclusion because in the course of doing maths problems on the board QC would sometimes ask, of no one in particular, "what's the tangent of thirty seven degrees again?" Much to our amazement and long before those of us with log tables could look up and supply the answer, QC would say, "isn't it 0.7535?" And then, when we finally found it, the answer was indeed 0.7535! How did he know that? Surely, no mortal knew the entire log tables? Sometimes we felt like walking up to him in the corridor and ask, "sir, what's the cosine and sine of twenty seven degrees?" Just to test him. Later it occurred to us that he had been doing the same examples for years and so had memorized all the relevant data in these examples. But he had us fooled for a long time.
He was also a colourful character outside of the classroom. I did not witness this episode myself, but fellow students who did claimed that one afternoon after school QC had the misfortune of being stopped by a traffic cop at the corner of North Street and South Camp Road. Our math teacher had apparently committed a minor traffic violation and the traffic cop just happened to be there to pull him over. According to the students who were at the bus stop at the time, they approached QC's car from the left at the same time as the cop was approaching from the right. They could not afford to miss this once in a life time confrontation between the math teacher and the traffic cop. One student source said that with the cop and the inquisitive students fast approaching, QC put his head through his window and in that unique voice of his said to the cop, "there is no necessity to create a scene!" That vintage QC statement completely disarmed the cop who apparently gave him a simple verbal warning instead of the ticket he had intended to give. And with that QC drove away up South Camp Road.
Reports are that QC now lives in New York and is teaching mathematics with the same zeal and enthusiasm at a co-ed high school in Brooklyn. A few years ago , he was presented with an award by the New York Chapter of the KCOBA in recognition of his years of dedicated service as a math ematics teacher extraordinaire at KC.
