Morning Story: Open letter to Mr Tony Burns

Mark Story is deputy editor at Hawke's Bay Today.This letter is reading somewhat like a eulogy. Apologies for that.

Dear Mr Burns,

So they tell me you've retired?

Forty-five years of teaching maths and you've put your cue in the rack. Off the St John's College grid. The most treasured piece of the school furniture on a mission to uncover what X really equals.

It's a tad difficult for us old boys to fathom.

Of course the term old boy suggests a student who's left the school. That's where your chronology is so interesting - five years at St John's College as a student, a few years of tertiary training then back to the same school for 45 years. Lunacy, some would say.

But then you were unique.

Unique in that you once told me you thought teachers were "overpaid". Boy, does that date you among your colleagues.

Unique in that you're the only teacher I still greet with honorifics. Calling you Tony just doesn't seem right.

Unique in that yours was the only class where problem kids didn't play up.

For these reasons, and the ones to follow, I simply couldn't let you slip out the gates on Jervois St without a mention.

I don't have to tell you there's irony in me authoring this letter.

We both know I failed the very subject you taught. Quite miserably. Don't take that professionally or personally. Even to this day, maths' vernacular remains as arcane as its purpose. If it had a beauty, she never revealed herself to me.

While you taught my contemporaries to seek out patterns, formulate conjectures and make robust deductions, I stared out the window at the three giant oaks. My passion was words. Hence the only time I inspired that adolescent maths class was when I announced algebra contained the word "bra".

During my university years, certain old boys who studied advanced calculus would come home during varsity holidays to run tertiary conundrums past their old secondary teacher. I'm told you solved each with ease, and were forever open to doing so.

That, in my book, is true class. That is, you devoted as much lesson time to the deadwood, like me, as you did to the mathematical elite. Today, where scholarship numbers are the modern secondary currency, that's remarkably noble.

This letter is reading somewhat like a eulogy. Apologies for that. You're still here after all. It's just that the announcement of your retirement on the back of the school newsletter, with your picture, read like a funeral service sheet to us old boys.

This numerically illiterate former student found you nothing short of inspirational. News of your leaving leaves me a tad nostalgic, a tad emotional. Trust me, I'm not alone in struggling to imagine the college without you.

As a writer, many make mention of my apt surname. "How glorious", one recently said. Academics call this phenomenon nominative determinism, where, on some unconscious level, it's assumed our surnames have an effect on determining career choice.

You lend weight to that theory, if, as they say, education isn't the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. How glorious.

All I can hope is the privileged students of your last ever lesson realised what they were witnessing.

Happy trails to you, Mr Burns. Now the chalk dust has settled you can finally begin your tenure as an old boy. I hope X equals everything you wished for.