X Marks the Spot

[Deleted]

Although he enjoyed not having to do anything over the summer, he truly did miss seeing the student’s faces in class each day. Getting dressed Phillip realized he had forgotten to make his coffee. There had been a few days last year when he hadn’t had his coffee and his students realized it.

Turning on his coffee maker, Phillip had gotten into the habit of getting everything ready the night before. Pouring the black liquid into his travel mug, he was ready to go. Grabbing his briefcase and keys he walked out of his apartment and down the stairs to his classroom.

Entering the room it hadn’t changed one bit since last year, which was good news considering he didn’t do anything with it. He knew exactly what his lesson was going to be about today. Sitting his coffee and briefcase on his desk he walked over to the whiteboard, uncapped a blue marker, and wrote Solving for ‘X’. Recapping the marker he sat it back where he got it and walked to his desk. As for preparing for his class that was all that needed to be done. Now all there was to do was wait for his pupils to come in.

outfit

Calling:
@neigh
Cara-Jean Kitchi
Cortney Smit
Gretchen Holmes

[Cara-Jean Kitchi]

Cara was glad that there was enough time between classes so that she could visit the bathroom when needed, and she was pleased that she carried toothbrush and paste in a plastic bag in her satchel along with facial wipes. She just didn't have anything to get rid of the tattoo that her temple was beating along to.

She walked into the classroom where the pre-algebra class was held. Again, it wasn't a class she would have chosen for herself, but she wasn't used to being able to make her own choices. Her step paused as she stepped into the room and found herself in there alone with a male, but she mentally shook it off as she bowed her head toward the man, hoping that she hadn't just done the wrong thing by not speaking to him, and crossed the room to one of the front desks where she began to set her table up. Her table was set up almost religiously, always the same way, but that was just her.

She dated the top of her page, after putting her glasses on, along with writing the heading on the board on to the top of her page, and changed the black pen for the blue one and waited for class to start.

[Cortney Smit]

Dressed in her cheer uniform, Cortney was flanked by other cheerleaders as she made her way down the halls of the academic building. She looked down her nose at the students who didn't get out of her way fast enough, though shared smiles and words with those that spoke to her. Sure, she was the captain of the squad, but she knew that she needed to keep the peace with the student body, especially after the event in the cafeteria only days earlier.

Air kissing the girls who weren't in her class, she walked into the algebra room. She knew that she was a little beyond pre-algebra, but she had to have a math class, and she had no interest in attending a harder class. She gave Mr Mackenzie a charming smile as she walked to her table in the middle of the room and dropped her bag on the ground. She'd noticed the other student who had already been seated and looked way too eager to get started on the first day of the year.

She noisily got her things out of her bag, and clattered them into the desk and sat back as she waited for the man at the front of the room to kick things off.

[Deleted]

Amber hated math class.  She had been having trouble with math for years.  She never understood it because it never made any sense at all but usually just seemed like numbers and symbols arranged randomly.  

Her older brother, who was really good at math, used to try to help her with her math homework, but she still didn't understand it and eventually he gave up, claiming that she was never going to use it in real life anyway.  Whenever she had math homework since then, he had her hand him her homework and he would do it on a separate piece of paper, give it back to her and have her copy it down.  She often worried that that was cheating, but she didn't want to tell her brother that it was wrong when he was just trying to help her, and they never came even close to being caught.  It was odd that no one ever seemed to find it strange that her homework grade was so much higher then her test grade, but at least it was always high enough for her to pass.

Amber walked in and choose a random seat.  She had taken pre-algebra class in junior high, but she didn't really understand any of it and, without her brother around, she wasn't sure how she was going to pass.

[Gretchen Holmes]

Gretchen knew she was late, but she'd gotten delayed in changing out of her riding attire when she realized her canary was getting low on water. She'd had to refill it, and then she'd misplaced her bag, it was frustrating. But she'd gotten her act together and was only about a minute or two late. As she entered the room she saw three other girls there, all whom looked as though they'd rather be anywhere else but here.

Gretchen supposed being in a class with people who didn't want to be there wasn't the worst thing in the world, but it was pretty bad. At least the class was small, that made her feel a little better about it. Besides, if she was being completely honest with herself she didn't want to be here either. She hated math, passionately. 

Finding a seat, Gretchen sat down and quietly pulled out a notebook and pencil. The board said they would be learning about solving x, which was something she actually knew how to do. That didn't help hold her interest though, and she instead began doodling a picture of a ballerina and an Andalusian dancing together. Over the summer she'd read a book about drawing horses, which helped her now. The quality of her doodles had indeed improved quite a bit, though she certainly would not consider herself an artist by any means. 

[Deleted]

Wasting no time in getting the class started once he counted the four girls who were to be in the class and the bell rung, Phillip started class. ”Alright ladies, I’m Mr. Mackenzie for those of you who don’t know me. I teach all the algebras, starting with pre-algebra.” He clapped his hands.

”I’m not really into the going around the room and playing games to get to know everyone. I have pictures I know your names and there are four of you. If you really want to know someone else’s name and you don’t ask them outside of class, please. I am here to be your teacher and inform you about the lovely ways of mathematics.” Phillip smiled as he finished his spiel.

”So as I hope you have noticed we will be starting right away with Solving for X. My first question for anyone who wants to answer it will be in the simplest terms, what is X?” He wanted the simplest answer as well, although he knew that wasn’t what he was going to get. So he tacked on a bit more, ”X is a…” Phillip trailed off and waited for one of the girls to raise their hands to answer the semi question.

[Cara-Jean Kitchi]

She had meant to sit there and wait for class to start, but somehow the pencil had made its way into her hand and the border of her page was now decorated with an ivy vine. She jumped as the man at the front of the room started speaking, jumping again as he clapped his hands, then cursing herself for doing it.

She leased a silent sigh of thanks when Mr Mackenzie said they weren't going to play silly games and getting to know each other, she hated those games as they generally including sharing the likes of where one from, what their parents did for a living or sharing their likes, and only one of those topics was she willing to share any information about, and then only by forced extraction.

She swapped the pencil for the black pen and wrote down the question the man at the front of the room asked. What is X? The exchanging the black pen for the blue she wrote down her answer: X is a variable. A variable is a symbol for a number we don't know yet. She tapped the other end of the pen on her paper, tempted to add to her answer, but held off. Yes, she knew that the man wanted a spoken answer, but Cara had been trained with the seen and not heard philosophy and she preferred it that way.

[Cortney Smit]

Cortney was typing a text on her cell phone as she waited for the teacher to call attention and start class, and dropped her phone into her bag when Mr Mackenzie introduced himself. She then leaned over and pulled it out again, quickly waking it up and turning it onto silent before letting it slip from her fingers again, giving the man a bright smile as she sat up.

She pulled a face at his question. "Ooh, ooh. X is the twenty-fourth letter in the alphabet!" She said quietly, giggling at her own joke before she pressed her lips together, trying to feign innocence, though her shoulders were still shaking as she held back her giggles. She then shook her head, trying to become sensible again, though she was failing miserably and pulling off the stereotype of cheerleaders being complete air-heads quite well. And at least she didn't say anything stupid like: X marks the spot.

She tapped her pen onto her book then raised her hand, all giggles now gone. "I don't know the word for it, but I know that X is used to replace numbers." She offered with a shrug as she pulled her ponytail tight on the top of her head.

[Deleted]

Amber had not idea what X was.  To her, it was a random symbol in a line of numbers for a math problem, although she thought that whatever it's meaning was changed per problem.  She wished her brother was here, or that she had a way to contact him without everyone noticing.  He was good at math and she knew that he would know what X was, but she also knew that he wouldn't want her to know.

Amber was glad when one the the others girls answered.  It didn't sound like it was a very good answer, but at least someone had attempted an answered.  Amber hoped that Mr. Mackenzie would accept that or that someone else would give a better one so that she wouldn't have to attempted an answer, because she had nothing that she could say about it that wouldn't make he sound like an idiot.  Amber had never been in a math class with so few students before.  She wished that she wasn't in such a small class because she knew that she wouldn't be able to hide in such a small class.  At her old school, she had always been in a big math class where no one would notice that she never participated or that she never worked on her math assignments in class, yet always had it done perfectly the next day and then did bad on the test.

[Gretchen Holmes]

Of all things, finding X was actually one of the least difficult. However Gretchen didn't really want to give an answer, so she sat quietly with her cheek propped on her hand and listened as another girl began to answer. Gretchen found herself a little annoyed at the girl's attitude, with her giggling and carrying on before giving a not so great answer. However Gretchen immediately reminded herself not to care about the other girl, especially considering the fact that at least she'd offered an answer. Unlike Gretchen, who barely paying attention anymore and was instead day-dreaming about riding horses with Tom Hiddleston.

Trying to snap herself back to reality, she glanced back down at her unfinished doodle. She'd only been halfway done with it by the time class had started, but she'd wanted to try and pay just a little attention to class before getting back to it. That hadn't actually happened for more than a few minutes, but at least she'd tried to be interested in math? She mentally shook herself, she needed to focus. But, the doodle, it needed to be fixed! Just glancing down for an instantly Gretchen could already tell that one of the ballerina's legs was slightly too long, and the horse's head needed to be drawn a little smaller as it was currently too large for his body. Picking up her pencil, she began erasing and correcting her mistakes, totally uninvested in the class anymore. X? X was a variable, you had to solve for it usually using an algebraic expression. See? She knew about X, so why torture herself listening to people who hated this class as much as she did?

[Deleted]

Phillip listened to the silence for a few seconds before a hand rose and he called on the owner, ”Miss Smit.” Listening to the girl’s reply he bit back his smart remark that he would have usually made and listened to the second part of her response. ”Yes, that is true; X does replace letters in an equation. But it does have a name.” Phillip looked around the room to see if he could catch anyone’s eye contact.

Just as he swept the room the girls’ eyes dropped to their desk. ”Alright since no one would like to speak up I’ll call on someone, involuntarily.” He picked one of the other three at random, ”Miss Kitchi, could you inform us on what the name I’m looking for is?”

He knew in his few years of experience that if students didn’t raise their hands it was for three simple reasons, they didn’t know the answer, which was the most popular, next one was they were shy and didn’t like to speak in front of others, and the last but not his favorite they were lazy, though Phillip also found that the lazy ones were those who liked to spurt out silly answers that sometimes had nothing to do with the subject.

[Cara-Jean Kitchi]

Cara kept her head down as she continued making notes: 'X' is often used to represent an unknown quantity or variable. Similarly, in English, X represents the unknown, as in X-rays, which baffled their discoverer, and Malcolm X, who chose the symbol to represent the forgotten name of his African ancestors.

This meaning of the letter X traces back to the Arabic word for "thing," or 'šay'. In ancient texts, such as Al-Jabr, a manuscript written in Baghdad in 820 A.D. that established the rules of algebra, mathematical variables were called things. (An equation might read "three things equal 15," for example — the thing being five.)

When Al-Jabr was later translated into Old Spanish, the word 'šay' was written as "xei." This soon came to be abbreviated as X. She listened as the head cheerleader took point and answered the question. With a silent sigh, Cara gave a slight shake of her head at the answer, but was slightly impressed that the Senior actually managed an intelligent answer in there as well - it seemed the teacher was just as shocked.

She flinched as her name was called. So much for being invisible. She lifted her head a little, enough to look at the teacher before she looked down at her work again as she licked her lips and tried to find the words she needed. She looked at her paper, all she had to do was read off the paper, but she opened and closed her mouth a couple of times before the words actually made their way to the surface. "X is a variable. A variable is a symbol for a number we don't know yet. X is used to represent the unknown." She managed in her whisper-soft voice, hoping that the volume was enough so that the teacher could hear what she had said.