So, while not being outrageously posh
Our school **did** have a rowing team – in fact, on the occasions when they competed against other schools from the area, it was just like the Oxford-Cambridge boat race – if they’d had to swerve from time to time to avoid drifting shoals of discarded rubber johnnies in the Mersey. But I digress.

The teacher who coached the rowing team was also one of the maths masters who taught our year, and we’d ended up getting him assigned to teach our class for GCSE.
This coincided with him becoming more and more obsessed about winning the rowing competitions. Invariably, in class, instead of trying to work out how long it took 3 men to dig 1 ditch if it took 4 men an hour, we were constantly set problems exploring the different permutations of rowers rowing at different speeds, and different numbers of rowers in the same boat, as though he could put together the ultimate rowing team by sheer power of mathematics.

He ended up having some sort of breakdown actually while he was teaching a class (not ours) and was literally thrown into the back of the ambulance still babbling about numbers of rowers and how he was going to find the equation that would grant him victory on the river.

He was our oar-sum teacher.
(tjn whizzing on the electric fence of life, Tue 22 Mar 2011, 21:22, Reply)