Mr. Kamin

He taught the curriculum well. But he taught life even better. He respected our intelligence and common sense, and skipped over familiar phrases such as "don't drink and drive" to teach us valuable lessons as only Mr. Kamin could.

He knew that when we enrolled in 'Principles of Mathematics 12 Enriched', that was what we expected to get. He delivered on 'Principles of Mathematics 12', each class hoisting the triangle of whiteboard, marker, and graph paper by their centroid, the pertinent example. With this unstoppable force Mr. Kamin crushed misconceptions and common fallacies and conquered a new facet of our course with characteristic efficiency and well-timed humour. Under his leadership every topic to be covered became a battle to be fought: solving equations against extraneous roots, inverse and reciprocal functions against bad notation, justifying our answer against illegible handwriting. When we left the classroom the ink of victory was fresh on our pages.

But when he covered the 'Enriched' part of our course we got more than we signed up for. In the intervals of fighting collectively for The Correct Answer, he engaged us in a subtler but more important mission: to seek out individually Our Best Answer, to discover what was most valuable to each of us, personally. Year after year problem solving had been taken out of the course and replaced by reinforcements of modern society's view of standardized tests, that smiles on our faces should come not from what we wrote on our exam, but from the number somebody else wrote on top. As children of this era, we entered Mr. Kamin's classroom with the knowledge that to society, in a sense, the closer this fractional number was to 1, the closer we were to being a whole person. As with all other logical and sincerely-formed ideas, Mr. Kamin did not denounce this knowledge. "I know you care about marks," he would say, "you want to get into university." But he explored alternative perspectives and, by example, taught us to do so as well. "Why should you write math contests?" he would ask us. As with all questions he asked, we relied on Mr. Kamin to give us the answer. "It looks good on your application," he reminded us, as a prelude to his true response: "Because you're supposed to enjoy problem solving, this is Math 12 Enriched. It's good for you!" He didn't use more words to fortify his position. The decision to accept his first reason, his second, or our own, was left up to each one of us. But through his impressive command of voice and relaxed but firm posture, we saw that we couldn't go wrong in following his lead.

In this way Mr. Kamin taught us to always obey the rules, but when we got the chance, we should consider their merit. Guided by this simple mantra we would always succeed, and never stray too far down the wrong path.