Math time shenanigans

[utopiamods]

Characters: Everyone
Format: Whatever
This log is: open
Location: Math class

It's a bright and sunny weekday morning. The sort of morning one should be spending sleeping in, or failing that, outside playing with friends.

Sadly for all of you, you're in this classroom studying logarithms. (Well, except for those of you who are cutting class. Good luck when finals roll around!) Right now, you've been split up into groups of three and four and should be quizzing each other on the questions from the end of the chapter in your textbook. If you're anything like ordinary high school students, though, you're probably discussing something completely different.

Comments

[summerstars]

That was such a (excuse the 'pun') stupid thing to say, all she could think of was rolling her eyes while her brain tried to catch up.

"Oh yes, a not-photographic memory and not-stellar but working at it skill in math which means I get things wrong sometimes, means I'm stupid. Obviously." She couldn't even work up the energy to be peeved at him, so instead she raised her eyebrows and gave him a good stare.

"I suppose you have no problems at all with any topic, always learn whatever it is the first time it's explained and can remember it perfectly a few months later?"

[frozen_desires]

Instead of answering her, Tougyu simply continued to work away at the problem. Occasionally he would pause and scratch out something he'd written a mere two seconds ago, indicating he was no closer to solving the problem then when he had started out. Still, as he continued to make mistake after mistake, he never once seemed to get frustrated or even the tiniest bit annoyed.

After a moment, he went to a corner of the page and wrote "6 - 4 = 2". Then he went to the line directly beneath that and wrote "6 = 4 + X".

That finished, he pulled his hand away to show her what he'd written. "Numbers change but you can always solve them by following the same thought process. You're stupid because you said you can't check to see if it's right. If it all adds up... it's right."

[summerstars]

Maybe he was right. Maybe he wasn't, since in her experience, there was any number of ways of accidentally getting something wrong and not noticing it in a math problem. She shrugged, determined to not let herself get annoyed, and leaned forward to see.

"I'm not going to tell you if this is right, you know," Grenn paused to look up at Tougyu, eyes narrowed, but there was no indication as to whether what he'd done was right or wrong. "If we come from the same timeline, someone knowing things before they should have been invented or solved would change things."

Of course, she had no idea, exactly, when these two particular math problems had been solved; she was rather sure one of them was after the new calendar was instated, but the other was sometime before that. Maybe it didn't matter. She had messed up several times now. But that didn't mean she'd stop trying.

[frozen_desires]

"Maybe you're supposed to mess it up." Tougyu replied without skipping a beat as he set her pencil down on her notepad and sat back in his chair, looking at it with a minute frown. He didn't seem to really be thinking about his conversation with her but from the way his eyes flickered to her and back to the paper, it seemed to be a given that she was at least occupying some part of his mind.