Dennis Shaw died last month. The news of his death literally clogged up my Hotmail inbox. Friends, classmates and seniors I still keep in touch with took the time to write in with the news of his death.
Dennis Shaw died last month. The news of his death literally clogged up my Hotmail inbox. Friends, classmates and seniors I still keep in touch with took the time to write in with the news of his death.
Most of the messages were different in presentation but the gist was the same forcing me to close my eyes and try and re-cap my life in the early eighties.
Dennis Shaw was my class teacher when I was in the most impressionable age of my life: 16 years and in tenth grade at a boarding school.
The mind rewinds to a school reunion in which we went back to what was called 'home'. Looking out for 'Sir' (as we called him) in the teacher's room, among the faces of many other teachers, I was forced to go up to the secretary (a fresh new face) and ask her if he was around to meet the Class of '82.
"And you are?" she enquired in a voice of pleasant authority.
"I'm one of his boys," I said. The funny part is that it was true.
He came out minutes later. The gait was the same, the back still hunched and the suspenders held up the baggy trousers. He asked the familiar question: "And what do you want?"
His students, past and future, testified that the question was the same, always.
I was one of Dennis Shaw's boys. In 1981 he was closing in on nearly 30 years of service in the teaching profession.
He had fine tuned his skills but his interests still lay in mathematics and English.
Every day at class he opened his Pandora's box which contained gifts acquired over those three decades and he let us have a sneak preview of it with a promise that there was more to come the next day. Pythogoras never made much sense, but Shakespeare was never so good.
He had mixed results with me. The maths was putrid, the English, however, held out promise. But we were all unanimous in fascination for our guru.
He had to be more than good. I mean this was the eighties, when you were in awe of the Rubik's cube, when your hair defied gravity (it was the punk era), crushes were a dime a dozen, Rocky (Stallone) was the man.
But through all this we referred to ourselves as "Shaw's boys."
He offered me the part of Puck I didn't want it in a Midsummer's Night Dream. I sulked, he laughed and cajoled me into it, telling me that I was the best.
I believed him and became an actor for a day.
He created a community each year: a bickering, enthusiastic but highly engaged group of students for a class that would be better than the sum of its parts.
I could tell you about the rest of his boys. They are spread out all over the globe making a living.
I could also (but for lack of space) dwell on all the friendships, scrapes and failures that we endured under him.
We moved on remembering him, even as he finished with one batch of pupils and moved on to a fresh one every year.
There were 20 batches since 1982 and I wonder if he remembered us all.
But he never gave it away. And even as the reunion ended he came up, put his arms around me and said, "You were always my favourite." And I smiled because I knew he loved me, and I also knew that he said that to all his boys.
And then came the advice: "Remember, the only rules you should follow are the one's you can break."
Now when was the last time your class teacher told you that?
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