Sharing Your Story

This month, we profile Peter Smart, a former mathematics professor who began teaching at Royal Roads Military College in 1967 and then continued to teach two additional semesters after retiring in 1989.

Smart reflects on "sense of place" The fact that Royal Roads is such a lovely place to work is the icing on the cake! Just to be in this setting and listening to the peacocks, it's a wonderful feeling now to look back and realize how lucky I was. - Peter Smart, RRMC math professor, 1967-1989

Teaching is one of those things . . . you have to inspire people; you have to get them excited about learning.

Not that you can be successful 100 per cent of the time but, interestingly enough, I found that if you can inspire a good number of students then they end up bringing the other ones along – it becomes contagious.

I don’t think I had a single student back then who did not enjoy my mathematics. I know this from the feedback I still receive long after they've finished the course. Some of them are retired and so on and they just come in and they hug you and they say "if it wasn’t for you we wouldn’t be in here".

When Royal Roads was a military college, the cadets were busy with their training all the time - from getting up in the morning right through the whole day. It meant there was no way to offer them extra help during the day. So when do you do it? The only time you can do tutoring is at night, after supper, and normally their study time started at 7:00 p.m.

So . . . I stayed here just about every night and I had a condition that I would stay until sometimes midnight. I’d also tell them that they could still phone me if they had troubles but I preferred that they not call after 2:30 a.m.

You think you’re doing a good job as a teacher and you know you’re doing your best because you can see the class marks and whether the students are "getting it" but I have found the rewards really come much later when you have chance meetings and reunions with your former students.

I didn’t come to Royal Roads right away. I joined the military and became a naval officer so I was teaching down at HMCS Venture. There, we used to teach a similar model to RRMC but it wasn’t a university degree program. You did what was roughly equivalent to a grade 13 and then you did a year of seamanship and graduated as an acting sub-lieutenant. 

After HMCS Venture, I went back to teaching high school in Cranbrook, B.C. but I was only there about three months when RRMC phoned me and invited me to join the military college. I think the reason they wanted me is that a number of students who came to the college from HMCS Venture did so much better than anybody else - especially on the mathematics side.

Volunteering is important aspect of teaching There were some students who were very, very poor in mathematics but if you have a boxing match with them, you have an opportunity to communicate and learn what they need in order to do better.

To be a good teacher, we assume that you know your subject matter. That’s a given but what it also takes is energy. You've got to be able to charge a class up. If you don’t have enthusiasm and zip, you can’t really do that.

Even in class, you can bring in humour as well. That’s another thing – humour and laughter. They are as important as energy and enthusiasm.

I have a couple of students who are regularily in touch with me even now. There’s one fellow, for example, who writes to me or phones and has sent a card every Christmas since 1967. These former students become very special to me and it's like there's a kind of a thread there that hasn’t broken.

In addition to teaching, I also coached the cross-country running team from 1962 to 1978. We competed against teams locally and different colleges and universities.

When I retired, the current team gave me a great big brass plaque engraved with all the names of all the runners I'd coached over 16 years.

There was an advantage to doing volunteer activities as well as teaching. I would get to know my students better and the more you know about a person the more likely you are to be able to help them a little more. For example, there were some students who were very, very poor in mathematics but if you have a boxing match with them, you have an opportunity to communicate and learn what they need to do better.

I tell former students that I feel very fortunate and grateful to have had the chance to teach them and especially now that they’re coming to the end of their careers it's so gratifying to see how well they have all done. That, to me, is the greatest reward I could ever have received from anywhere.

The fact that Royal Roads was - and is - also such a lovely place to work is the icing on the cake! Just to be in this setting and listening to the peacocks, it's a wonderful feeling now to look back and realize how lucky I was.

We were supposed to drive in the back way but I always came in front of the castle every morning at 5:30 to see the lions and the gardens and all that. I still feel a little nostalgia for the past even today but I believe that now is the only time we own. The past is gone. The future we don’t know. This is the time you make. We take all the joy and everything we get out of this moment.

This an edited excerpt taken from a recorded interview with Karen Inkster, RRU's alumni and heritage projects associate. She is coordinating an oral history project bringing together stories from ex-cadet alumni.