In all the heated debate which constantly rages around education reforms and books and buildings and grades, it is astonishing how people forget what a difference a teacher can make. You snore your way through years of deadly dull history lessons, then you have a reserve teacher for two periods and you’re hooked on the Thirty Years War or the books of Marguerite Yourcenar for life. Ask anybody — what they remember from school are the teachers. There is nothing to beat an inspiring teacher. There is no substitute — absolutely none — for the charisma of an enthusiast. And if anyone radiated infectious enthusiasm, it was Mr Dehli. He was never seen in the duster coats worn by some teachers in those days; he always came to school looking spruce and dapper in a white shirt, a jacket and a bow tie which was always hopelessly askew by the end of a zestful lesson, as if he had just been in a fight, or on a wild airplane ride. Jonas Wergeland said more than once that he had had only one real teacher in twelve years of schooling. It was also, and not unimportantly, Mr Dehli who introduced him to Maya.
It sometimes seemed to Jonas that it was not actually people who made him feel embarrassed. He was embarrassed by the world. Or for the world. Because of its alarming flatness. But thanks to Mr Dehli, after only a few months at junior high Jonas again began to discern a suggestion of depth, little glimpses of something behind the flatness. Through a fruitful process of repetition Mr Dehli also succeeded in reawakening the round-eyed joy of the first years at school; the delight of drawing a cow’s four stomachs, the pride in managing to construct a ninety-degree angle with the aid of compasses, the wonder aroused by a word like ‘accusative’. And suddenly Jonas understood the full magnitude of things: the purpose of the meridian concept, the consequences of Caesar’s statement when he crossed the Rubicon, the wealth of associations contained within a word like ‘stamen’. Mr Dehli got them to write whole stories in the pluperfect, or the past-future-perfect tense.
‘What is this?’ he asked during their first Norwegian period, writing a large H on the board so emphatically that chalk flew everywhere — Mr Dehli could pull a stick of chalk out of his jacket pocket quicker than any gunslinger. The whole class looked blank. ‘Take a good look,’ he said. ‘Can’t you see that it’s a ladder? Every letter in the alphabet is a ladder. Use them well and you’ll be able to climb wherever you please.’
Mr Dehli set out to elevate his pupils. Provide them with ladders to enable them to reach a higher plane. He never brought a pupil down. Instead, as an educator in the truest sense of that word, he drew out the best in them, drew from them things they did not even know they knew. He was not unlike a personage who would later appear on Norwegian television, the charismatic presenter of the musical quiz programme Counterpoint, Sten Broman who, like Mr Dehli, performed his duties dressed to the nines, in suits he designed himself, and had a knack for eliciting the correct answers from teams who, to begin with, seemed totally stumped; he seemed to take pride in bringing out the contestants’ subliminal knowledge.
Schoolmaster Dehli employed a number of unorthodox methods. When they were studying Ibsen, he turned up for class with a pocket mirror in one hand and his chest covered in medals. ‘It is impossible to understand Ibsen without also taking into account his vanity and his ambition,’ Mr Dehli declared. Who could forget something like that?
Often he would turn things on their heads. ‘There are any number of possible futures, everybody knows that,’ he said during one history class. ‘But did it ever occur to you that there also exists a wealth of possible pasts? For tomorrow I want you to write a couple of pages on what the Second World War would have been like for someone from Japan. Don’t just sit there gawping. Make a note in your homework books.’
Mr Dehli’s main interest lay, however, in impressing upon them the way in which the different subjects were all interconnected, as in an organic system of learning. He showed them how just about everything can be set into a fresh context. He told them about poets in history class and religion in Norwegian classes. It came as a shock to Jonas to hear his teacher say that there was nothing to stop them introducing elements from the Weed’s or Miss Pi’s domains, from natural history and maths, that is, into their essays. Mr Dehli advocated a viewpoint which would hold sway in the universities a decade later: if you wanted to do something original with your life then you needed to have both feet on the ground, firmly planted in at least two different realms of study. The more remote from one another the better.
Although Mr Dehli could not know it, in his mind Jonas likened this idea to a necklace he had seen as a child. On it hung a disc engraved on both sides with obscure strokes and dashes which, when you spun the disc round, spelled ‘I love you’.
Despite his conviction that he was special, despite his gift for thinking, up until now Jonas had not done particularly well at school. Or at least, he had not been interested. With the advent, in fifth grade, of the more soporific, factually oriented lessons, he fell behind. Not even the weird and often funny sentences which their teacher made up to help them remember the names of towns in southern Norway or the fjords of Finnmark could enliven his interest. Particularly when it came to writing Norwegian essays Jonas had a problem: he tended to lose himself in the ramifications of his own mental associations. His essay for the exam in eighth grade was a disaster, rewarded, or punished rather, with a P for Poor.
But here he had found a teacher who did exactly the same thing, the difference being that Mr Dehli turned it into a strength. ‘What is the opposite of truth?’ he asked on one occasion, and answered before they had time to think: ‘Clarity.’ Mr Dehli was an expert climber; he would venture out onto the thinnest branches of a line of reasoning, then with a sudden swoop come swinging back to the trunk, possibly on a creeper. This, for Jonas, was more thrilling than the trapeze artists at the circus. Frequently he would sit at his desk, following — heart in mouth, almost — their master’s exposition of a complex topic, with one thought leading to another as he scrawled key words and phrases on the board. And just when Jonas was sure that their poor teacher had lost his way completely, when Mr Dehli, with his hair covered in chalk dust and his bow tie woefully askew, was stammering ‘and … and … and…’, suddenly it would come, that blessed ‘but …’, and a sigh of relief would run through the classroom, to be followed by the master’s closing triple-somersault of an argument, which he delivered while circling some of the key words and drawing a couple of connecting lines that made Jonas gasp with surprised understanding.
‘Watch this,’ Mr Dehli said in Norwegian class one day, placing a glass beaker of water over a Bunsen burner. ‘Today we’re going to produce an ester.’ He poured equal amounts of ethanol and acetic acid into a test tube and let it sit for a while in the boiling water. ‘See? Nothing happens,’ he announced, absent-mindedly waving a grammar book in the air. ‘In order to instigate a reaction we need something else. Watch carefully now.’ Mr Dehli added a few drops of concentrated sulphuric acid to the test tube and put it back into the boiling water. A lovely smell, like fruit or perfume, filled the classroom. What was going on? Jonas wondered. Chemistry in the Norwegian class? ‘Imagine that those two liquids are two different thoughts,’ Mr Dehli said. ‘Put them together and nothing happens. But then imagine that a third thought suddenly comes to me and I think this along with the other two. Abracadabra! A reaction is triggered!’ Mr Dehli pointed triumphantly to the test tube containing the sweet-smelling liquid. ‘These are the thoughts you have to pursue,’ he concluded, thereby making the final link between chemistry and Norwegian. ‘Those which act as catalysts.’ No one understood what he was getting at better than Jonas, who had for years been whipping up parallel thoughts while skipping doubles and — perhaps even more crucially — had seen the world grow, thanks to a real live ‘catalyst’.