A Complete Explanation Of Everything

Hungover to feck and started reading Fermat's Last Theorem, whilst the book is enjoyable enough, I mused more so on memories of school and maths classes in particular.

Reading the appendix and the proof for Pythagoras' old favourite, the sum of the square of the sides of a right angle triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse (great word! Bet you never thought you'd read that on this blog, eh???) sent me over the edge and I thought I'd post some reflections on Billy O'Sullivan, my old maths teacher.

School was average, really average. Don't get me wrong, Secondary (age 12 - 17) was bearable enough, classmates were mostly shitty, other years also mostly shitty, teachers mostly shitty. But mostly it seemed like PE and our half hour of indoor soccer seemed like the only respite unless the girls got changed first and forced us into doing something like rounders (like baseball with tennis rackets) or some rubbish.

There were a couple of decent teachers though, Garrigan - Geography, Ms. Hunter - English, even Fogerty in Irish (that's Gaeilge to you) and of course, Billy O'Sullivan - Maths.

Billy O'Sullivan equals BOS intials wise and it didn't take long or much imagination to make the leap and add the "co" required to form: Bosco, Ireland's semi legendary puppet entertainer of children. An afternoon show, that on later reflection was clearly made under the influence of heroic consumption of LSD and other assorted narcotics.




















Anyway, back to the maths. I was never particularly good at it but somehow Mr. O'Sullivan made it pleasant enough with his Cork wit and general asides. I could do each element well enough but throw me into the big exam and have questions on all areas it was plain that I was going to be dependent on a nice exam paper and a lot of luck to be skirting more than borderline "D"... Too big a risk but O'Sullivan didn't want to drop me from his class. We had about 12-14 people in our final year down from the original 30 or so. I was the last person to drop down to pass level but I didn't even switch rooms or teachers so late did I take the decision, I just got the pass papers out the back and talked about football with Mr. O'Sullivan and the rest of the lads.

Simple days despite the enormous pressure all the kids were under, I wished I had a bit more perspective about what it all meant that day but I got in the end, at the bottom of a pint glass and after four years of college.

I actually did applied mathematics for a while as an eight subject, shows you how studious and crazy I used to be. Seven or eight of us would turn up at around 8am and Billy would give us an extra class in the morning. Applied Maths is like a hopped up melange of physics and maths and in the end, it didn't take with me. Probably because our physics teacher was a load of old pony and was shown to be teaching a course of pure fantasy to us in the final event.

Still, Billy was a good sort and like I said, teachers like that pulled you through what was a pretty tragic experience, I was not a fan of secondary but my own life was not as miserable as it could get. Others had it far, far worse, I know.

The point of this post is simply raise a glass to Mr. O'Sullivan and say thanks, I'm still not very good at maths but you never made me actively hate it.

And that's a good thing.

In general.