Mr. Fabiyi

Mr. Fabiyi spoke quickly, carried little patience, and wore the broadest smile I have ever seen on a teacher. He was in a hurry for us. He taught Further Mathematics at Sharon Rose Schools and College in Saki, and he plainly loved the job. He liked being around us, liked working a solution out loud at the board, and particularly enjoyed explaining things to Kehinde Adeniji, the smartest girl in the class. In SS1, the year Nigerian secondary schools split students into science, arts and commercial, the science class got Further Maths on its timetable and we got Mr. Fabiyi. There were maybe fifteen to twenty of us. I was thirteen. He set about stretching what it was possible for us to learn.

The problem sets

His instrument was the take-home problem set. Calculus, matrices and probability carried the bulk of the work. We started at limits of functions and ran on through permutations and combinations. Each set held more problems than could physically be finished in the time he allotted, and no one ever finished one. Abib Adeagbo usually got furthest. His father taught mathematics, and numbers came to him the way speech comes to most people. Kehinde came next. I was always in the top three, as I remember it. The rest of the class fought the same pages.

He marked whatever we turned in, and granted more time only on the strength of what we had managed. The next set landed regardless. So the unfinished one rode underneath it while the class pushed into new material, and we were doing three things at once: closing out the old set, attempting the new one, learning what had not yet been taught. Hyper compression of time. We had to be better every week, and some dropped away before the term was out.

The nights

I stayed back after classes to get an early start, but the real shift ran at home. I would get in around 4.30 in the afternoon and head to bed by six or seven, then wake at eleven to work through the night. Electricity in Saki was erratic and the generator was always off by that hour, so I worked under a lantern lit by a wick. I loved those hours. I could hear the crickets and nothing else. In that quiet I toiled away, at times frustrated, at times excited when a solution came together. Nothing at school in daylight ever felt as good as cracking one of those problems open in the middle of the night. Such glorious times. Around two or three I went back to bed to catch what sleep remained before six, when my mother woke the house.

The promise

Mr. Fabiyi kept one promise in steady rotation: the scores we earned in his class would be the worst we would ever have, and we would crush every external exam. The first half needed no proving. The sets saw to it weekly. The second half we had to take on faith, with every week's marks arguing against it. It came due at WAEC. Everyone in the science class sat through Further Maths, but writing it in the exam was a choice, and roughly two thirds of us put our names down. Every one of us came out with an A or a B. Precisely as the man had said.

Abib and I became good friends in that classroom and have been friends ever since. These days he is completing a PhD in electrical engineering in North Carolina. The rest of that set went the same way. I am really proud of that class.

Years later I learned Russian in half the time the system allowed and thought little of it. The boy from Saki had been working compressed time since he was thirteen. The training happened in Mr. Fabiyi's classroom and in those lantern-lit nights, where problems kept turning out to be solvable and thinking kept turning out to be trainable. I believe Mr. Fabiyi went on to start a school of his own. I really hope he is doing well, wherever he is.