The wonder of it all
My sister Keya texted me on Sunday afternoon that Father Charlie, Professor Charles Cheverie, passed away on Aug. 31, 2019. The image that flashed before my eyes was that loving, affectionate smile, radiating from his face and eyes, with the delight he always expressed when he saw his former students.
I sat in his classroom in the late 1980’s to learn vertebrate zoology in second year and embryology in fourth year. He taught me biology. He also taught me how to teach. Every class would start with a question. The brilliance of the formulation was that it was an answerable question based on what we knew.
We’d answer and he was enthusiastic about our answers. Then he would build on that answer, and lead us to new facts, new ideas, new concepts. Then another question, another idea, another concept. All the while, he would walk back and forth, up and down the stairs of the Duffy amphitheatre, stopping to listen to our answers, cocking his head and thinking, intermingling stories, observations, fact. Then he would stop and observe, with the reverence and joy that the statement deserves, “Ah… the wonder of it all…”
I spent many afternoons taking advantage of Father Charlie’s office hours, asking him questions, discussing and debating principles of biology. He helped build the foundations that led me to my studies in medicine at McGill University and ultimately to my position as physician and professor at McGill. When I designed a course in epidemiology, I attended a two-day workshop in Teaching and Learning that encouraged us to implement an active learning paradigm. Don’t stand in front of a class and lecture, they recommended. Walk around with a portable microphone. Engage the students. Ask them questions. It was more than three decades since I’d been in Father Charlie’s classroom, but the “new” teaching approach was more decidedly what he had always done, all geared to showing us the wonder of it all.
I visited Father Charlie over the years during our annual visits to the Island. He spoke at the wedding when my husband and I married in 1995 at Jewell’s Garden on P.E.I. He met our sons too, many times over the years, and showed them how he could whip into his priestly attire on the spot like Superman. The years went by, one by one. Last year, we lost my father, Professor Satadal Dasgupta, another UPEI professor for whom teaching was a mission and vocation, not merely a job, and for whom P.E.I. and UPEI were communities, not just places.
Father Charlie was at the memorial we held for my father at the faculty lounge in the main building last July. He looked well, ageless really, with the same smile that I first beheld in 1987. Thank you, Father Charlie, for showing us the wonder of it all. Thank for reminding us that we can, and should, strive to be kind, humane, and learned, and that we can share both our knowledge and our spirit and do our small part to build a better world – for those here now and those who will be in the future.