Katie McGee and the No Good, Very Bad Exams
Summary: It's the end of term, and Katie McGee can't wait to be done. Part of the 'Future Perfect' universe.
Disclaimer: Katie and Leigh are mine; the rest belong to other people.
A/N: This takes place in the 'Future Perfect' universe, which features Katie and Leigh, the twin daughters of Tim and Abby.
Thanks to AislingK for writing Katie's math for me!
Seriously? Katie thought to herself, scrawling an angry red circle around the offending answer and dropping the exam booklet onto the 'done' pile with a sigh. The question defines t as 'time in the oven', genius! Where did you get the idea that it's 'number of chickens'? I mean, really... even if you can't handle the math, surely you can read!
She took a sip of her coffee, wishing for the fourth time in an hour that she had something alcoholic to put in it, and glanced around the room while she reached for the next exam. She really needed to finish the grading tonight, she thought, so she'd have time to tidy her tiny apartment before she left for home for the holidays. Uncle Gibbs would be horrified if he could see what it looked like now... as would her naval officer sister, who had somehow morphed from a messy tomboyish teenager to an obsessively tidy young woman. Katie had always been the neater of the twins, but her usual habits just didn't stand up at the end of term.
Every flat surface was strewn with paper, most of it still left over from her frantic end-of-term assignment-writing. She could see at least two empty pizza boxes stacked on the floor, and more empty soda cans than she'd like to admit were strewn around the small room. She simply hadn't had any time to clean up, between meeting her own deadlines and getting swamped with grading for the introductory calculus class for which she was a teaching assistant. Grading slave, she thought bitterly.
She was sitting cross-legged on her futon/couch, two piles of exams – done and to-do – at her feet. The to-do pile was getting smaller, much to her relief. She wasn't sure how much more of this she could take, and felt like her brain was about to explode from exposure to too much stupid. For a selective university that claimed to educate only the best and the brightest, there were a surprising number of idiots in her class. Sure, there were good students as well, including a few who reminded her of herself as a freshman, and a couple of others who were not naturally good at math, but who worked hard - she'd given a quiet cheer when she'd assigned one of them a B- on the final, a considerable improvement over his bare-pass on the midterm. But too many of them were lazy, and there were a few who could only be described as dumb.
She opened another exam booklet, skimming quickly through the answers. She wasn't even looking at the answer key anymore; she'd done enough of these to have memorised what the answers were supposed to be, and to be able to recognise the most common errors in her sleep. Literally, she thought, remembering last night's dream/nightmare sequence.
She got to the last question, and burst out laughing. The professor teaching the course insisted on using practical real-world applications of the math they were studying, in an effort to convince the students that it really wasn't just random numbers on a page and that it actually meant something that they should care about. So, the question began with a premise that a chicken is being cooked, and concerned a function giving the temperature of the chicken according to the time it's been in the oven. This kid had responded earnestly, "The fact that f'(20)=2 means that after 20 minutes there are now two chickens in the oven." Oh, those must be the magical doubling chickens! Well, that's one way to solve the problem of world hunger! she thought, still giggling.