I Stand on the Shoulders of Giants

In 2008, I was given the option to teach honors pre-calculus for the first time. The next year, as was the policy of my school at the time, was to teach AP BC calculus. This was a daunting task, it had been over 20 years since I last saw the material, and no matter what level you teach, it takes you a good couple of years in a row to get really good at teaching a particular course. The way that the school did things, This meant that it was only every other year I was going to get to teach either of these two courses again. This means that it took years, and I mean a good decade, to get really good at knowing and teaching the material. My colleague Les Roby had taught calculus since about 1972. I went to Les for help, surprisingly less often than I thought would be necessary.

Les had always been a master teacher. But I can’t say he was a really great mentor. Les could usually be found getting to school at the crack of dawn, blasting his hippie music in the teachers workspace only to leave only minutes later, running around the school, organizing his very winning academic team and tournament, or off fighting the administration in his role as union president, defender of the proletariat.

It’s like Les was always laying a fart and leaving, usually in the form of Crosby, Stills and Nash.

He’d re-emerge 15 minutes later and pose a question to anybody who was breathing, not really wanting validation or response, mostly just to hear himself ask the question. It was always like he had started the conversation with himself five minutes before entering the room. Often this was directed at me and I would just look at him and say, “Roby what the hell are you talking about?”

Les was hated by many (adults, but the kids loved him, which was all he really cared about I think) but respected by almost everybody. He was especially hated by administration and because of this, when I was untenured, he would warn me about sitting next to him. It was too dangerous to be in his immediate vicinity at meetings, where his default setting was always set at “logical, but contrarian.”

When I started working at White Plains, Les really only talked to the old-school teachers. We joked that he wouldn’t even try to know your name until you got tenure.

Somehow, Les seemed to approve of me and talked to me anyway. I’m not really sure how I was accepted into this old boys network (Steinel, Cutaia, DeFeo plus a few ballsy and vocal older females - Trust, Norelli) of brilliant older educators but I was always proud of that.

Still, when I asked Les for help on those occasions, he would basically say that it was easy, start an explanation and walk out the door before he finished.

It was just his way. Les, the personification of entropy. An object in motion tends to stay in motion, and Les was always moving.

I got through those first two years OK enough, even though by the end, I was so fried that when we were reviewing for the AP exam, I had to ask stellar students like Adam Jaffe and Rachel Fishkis to help their peers with questions I couldn’t remember how to do.

(They got perfect scores, definitely more of a testament to their proficiency and intellect than my teaching.)

So this nerd and crafter designed and created a personal thank you gift for Les’ support, even though that support was mostly in the form of friendship and an exemplar of professionalism, instead of actual mathematics teaching.

I had the hardest time with volumes of revolution. Les took the time to teach me how he makes his beautiful drawings and how those drawings help formulate an understanding of how the integral represents volume.

Here is the original design, the finished work from 2009, and some of the pristine notes that Les provided to me that I’ve kept all these years.

I stand on the shoulders of giants. And Les Roby was, and always will be, a giant to me.