Good bye Mr Tan. Hello Homework!

Argh Mr Tan(for those who do not know, he is my maths teacher who retired today) i am going to miss certain words of yours for better or worse i dont really know but none the less i will miss them.

"dont be a monkey!",

"You shd know what you are doing and not be like a computer program asked to memorize algorythms",

"you MUST write your working in this manner or else no one will understand",

"being good doesnt mean you will be the top scorer",

"even the construction workers work very hard do they earn a lot?",

"not all teachers are clever enough to understant that you know what you are doing show them that you are clever by writing all the steps down"(um really?),

"not all teachers know the double angle formula its not in syllabus dont use it",

"no one knows if 1+1=2 its a definition and that is why we are doing maths now",

"dont write faster than you think you wont know what you are writing."

"what kind of math is this?" "are u using your brain?"

"only if you get 80+ for all the tests can you not do your homework."

Um i may not have said this before but despite never doing well for his tests or not really paying much attention during his lessons i hav learnt a tremondious amount from him and i have also been inspired to be a great teacher like him but i guess he would ask me to forget about being a great teacher like him but to aim at the ideal and then surpass his ability.

I remember i was stuck at a question and he too was stuck at it, he said he would think of a method to solve the question and he gave me an idea which i used to solve the question. I must state the method was not a good method to do the question which actually has a rather simple method but his working inspired me to continue to try to attempt the question and eventually after inducing for a very long time i got a complicated agebraic expression. i was elated to see that the method actually worked.

In another seperate incident, he asked to borrow my notes to make sense of the topic of functional equations so that he could explain to me the topic. Then he took the pain to read through the badly written notes and then proceded to give me advise on how to understand(i could tell that he was actually unable to really comprehend the notes however he had tried his best to).

Mr Tan I will miss you for not only are you the best maths teacher who i have seen and had as one, i have also seen you as the pillar of support that has encouraged the whole class to do extremely well. It is no surprize then that the two top scoring classes both are taught by you.

Mr Tan, i also have to appolgise for bringing down the average of the class several times because i didnt peform well enough. However i know that you have always believed in me despite "punishing" me several times for acts that i feel are not punishabe. I still remember the first teat i took i scored a very low mark because my 6 looked like a zero. or when my 4 looked like a 9.

I shall end this long report by really thanking you for all that you have done for me and also by respecting your efforts to turn us all into great mathematicians by really showing you that i can be what you want us to be.