by
Peter Y. Woo, woobiola@yahoo.com,
HK School Cert. 1957
Assoc. Prof., Biola University, La Mirada, CA
HK School Cert. 1957
Assoc. Prof., Biola University, La Mirada, CA
Here are three recent tributes to Mr Chamberlain:
(a) I was teaching calculus for 16 years. One day I said, "You people are so lucky to have me as your teacher, all because of ---- Mr Terry Chamberlain, who influenced me to choose a career in math, in my high school days".
(b) In various math classes, I enjoy with devilish glee forcing the American youths to memorize the 12-line poem of trigonometry. "I want you to memorize it, not because we Asians like to memorize things (and force others to do so), but because I was taught such, by an Irishman teacher, Mr Chamberlain. Here it goes:
Sin sum equals sin cos plus cos sin,
Sin dif equals sin cos minus cos sin,
Cos sum equals cos cos minus sin sin,
Cos dif equals cos cos plus sin sin
Two sin cos equals sin sum plus sin dif,
. . . . etc. . . . .
If you don't like to memorize these 12 lines, then you may as well memorize chapter 8 of the book of Romans in the Bible. The choice is yours . . . . "
(c) Another occasion: I was teaching partial fractions techniques in 2nd semester calculus. There was a trick taught by Mr Chamberlain to express something such as
(2x+5)/(x+1)(x+2)(x+3) as
A/(x+1) + B/(x+2) + C/(x+3).
Mr Chamberlain taught us a nice trick to compute A, B, C. So I told my students: this trick is called the Irishman's method, in honor of him.
* * * *
Really, I treasure the numerous times that Mr Chamberlain got us to chant the "12-line poem" in class, day after day. He taught me math from Form 4 to 6, (equivalent to 10th to 12th grade high school in US) from 1955 to 58. Back in the 1950's we students memorized many, many things, and we Chinese are good at that. We memorized Tang poems, many verses in Confucius' Analects, quite a few essays of Han Yu, Liu ZongYuan, and other scholars, many dates in world history, memorized chemical formulas, some 14 properties of chlorine and 20 properties of benzene under the merciful pedagogy of Mr Chu KaFai. I regrettably did not, but others did, memorize English poetry, Shakespeare, or modern Chinese prose, or biological subjects.
Before Mr Chamberlain came, in Form 3, we were taught math by a Mr Kell. He was not as loving to us kids as Mr Chamberlain, and I frustrated him once by asking him an innocent geometry problem which got him spend hours on it and could not solve it unless he used trig, which we did not learn till Form 5. So the next morning he almost "threw the book" at me.
So when we had Mr Chamberlain for the first time in Form 4, we noticed he is kinder, nicer, never getting angry. One day someone in class did something messy and very untidy. I forgot whether it was homework or something else. Mr Chamberlain saw it, and exclaimed "Aiyah!" which got the whole class to laugh like crazy. Cantonese "aiyah" means "a frightful surprise", such as when you go into the kitchen and discover 3000 ants all crawling happily over spilled food on the floor.
I began to notice that he got "lazy", by giving us less homework, but doing more problems in class with our participation. High school teachers in Hong Kong carry a pitifully inhumane load of teaching some 5 hours of classes per day, like us teaching 25 undergrad units per week, plus Saturday. So Mr Chamberlain managed to get us all to work under his nose during class, and he got to call us by our Chinese names. Result: we all did better.
Classmate Ng WaiKwok (Sch Cert 1957) asked me whether I remember how many distinctions and credits we got in math back those years. I vaguely recall that our achievements in math and chemistry paralleled those of Queen's College, and we always beat King's College. We did beat QC once. And we were better than Wah-Yan or DBS. The only school we were no match with was St Paul's Co-ed. (If some of you can check the School Cert and Matric results as reported in South China Morning Post back then, it will be appreciated. SCMP has a storeroom of all the newspapers from 1940 till now, at their office near Taikoo City. )
As another tribute to Mr Chamberlain, these days I repurchased some of the textbooks he used in those days, which I collect with fondness. From British used bookstores such as www.abebooks.com, I ordered C.V. Durell's "A Geometry for Schools", but I could not get Durell and Robson's "A New Trigonometry for Schools". I also bought in HK some paperback version of S.L.Green's "Advanced Level Pure Mathematics", and Nightingale's "Higher Physics", which was a great help to me in those days, but I never got a distinction in physics in my whole life.
Just before School Cert Exam, Mr Chamberlain bought a heavy box to class one day. It was a tape recorder. Cassettes were not yet invented. He would get all of us to say something in English, and play them back. I got the most embarrassing moment in my life, as I stammered and muttered what thoughts that came to my mind that day. But I appreciate greatly his creative ideas of his helping us with our spoken English.
* * * *
Just a few years ago I reconnected with him. I wrote him a letter, "I'm Woo YamPoon, whom you taught from 1955 to 58, Form 4 to L6 . . . I wonder whether you still remember me ...." He replied (in my own words, because I cannot find his letter now) , "I remember you real well, as well as Ko HonYim, Tsui WaiFat, Cheng SaiWah . . . Perhaps I had a deep impression of the classes I first taught in HK. I caught you reading a book (under the desk) one day during class. But then I discovered it was Calculus. So I let you off, with a warning not to do it again. You were 2 years ahead of the class..."
I truly did not remember such a thing, because we all often read other books under the desk, especially during lectures by boring teachers. But Mr Chamberlain was never boring.
Of course I told him about the above mentioned three episodes. He was quite happy about them.
* * * *
Finally, one more great thing about Mr Chamberlain: The syllabus of Advanced Level pure math for Matriculation includes too many things, and most teacher would drop a few topics. He however, managed to find time to teach us a chapter on circle inversions, which is a part of modern geometry invented by Steiner in the 19th century. It is a technique that can solve some plane geometry problems involving circles. What it did for me was: Today I am one of the handful of people in the world that can solve such problems as published in a Canadian math magazine, the Crux Mathematicorum, if such technique is applicable. My solutions to these problems got published a few times, and I am greatly indebted to Mr Terry Chamberlain.
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