Well, I'm back and I still don't own Hetalia, so this is still fanfiction. I hope you enjoy it!
Reason 2: Substitute teachers don't teach every day the way regular teachers do, so there are certain things that catch them off guard that the class takes for granted. This can cause a certain level of hilarity when it's pointed out.
Chapter 2
Either a Stomachache or Diabetes, or Possibly Both
"I still can't believe you guys have math class first thing in the morning," America said to nobody in particular as he attempted to extricate the teacher's edition of the math textbook from the black hole of a teacher's desk without causing an office supply avalanche. "I mean, one, who can focus on math this early? And two, even if people can focus on math this early, who the heck wants to? Aren't you supposed to start off with the easy stuff to get the knowledge absorption started, and then do the harder stuff once your brain's already gotten into learning mode?" He gave the textbook a yank, freeing it from the pile of assorted teacher materials and, in the process, sending paperclips sliding down the side of the pile and onto the floor. "Oops. I'll get that in a minute."
Muffled laughter came from various spots in the classroom as several of the students tried not to give away the fact that the paperclip avalanche had been engineered by one of their own, who'd moved the cup of paperclips from the relatively safe spot behind the computer onto the top of a pile of books, paper, and notebooks when America hadn't been looking.
America, meanwhile, located the math-related instructions on the lesson plan. "Okay, so it says that you're supposed to do the problems on page 112 and 113. The multiplying and dividing fractions mixed review. Oh, and you're supposed to do this without talking. Because it's apparently impossible to talk and do math at the same time. So…you guys do that, and I'll be over by the desk picking up paper clips."
There were approximately thirty seconds of silence before the class decided to prove that it was in fact possible to talk and do math at the same time. This lasted for approximately thirty more seconds before they gave up on the math part and just talked.
"Guys," America interrupted them after several minutes of nothing being accomplished, "your teacher said you have to do the math problems for homework if you don't finish them in class. I don't see anyone doing actual math, which I guess kinda proves your teacher right about it being impossible to do math and talk. You know, I looked at the lesson plan, and there's no actual homework assigned. You guys could totally have a homework-free night if you get this done in class."
"Or we could have a work-free class," George Washington pointed out.
"You could," America agreed. "But I don't know why you would. There's nothing fun to do here except sit and talk, but when you get home, you could do whatever you want. I don't know why you'd rather do math at home, surrounded by all kinds of fun stuff you could be doing, instead of here where there's not much else to do anyway."
"Could we talk while we do math?" one of the girls asked.
"Is anyone doing math right now?" America responded, looking around the room. "I see exactly one pencil moving, and its owner isn't doing any talking. So clearly there's some truth to the speech and math not coexisting thing. I mean, if you guys want to try, I guess that's okay as long as you actually work while you talk. But don't blame me if you end up with homework because of it. And keep the volume down so we don't have the teachers next door getting annoyed at us, okay?"
A couple minutes of relative quiet descended on the room. America finished picking up the last of the paper clips, then plopped into the teacher's chair, hijacked a piece of paper from the printer, and started drawing a Superman comic. He got about as far as drawing the building that Superman was standing on before he was interrupted by one of the boys waving his hand wildly and calling "Mr. Jones, can you do an example problem on the board or something?"
"Um…I guess. What are you having trouble with?" America said, looking up from his Superman comic.
"The word problems."
America looked rather confused at this. "What's the difference between word problems and regular problems?"
"Word problems are evil."
"Ah. Of course. Okay, let's do one on the board to get our brains into math mode. Someone give me a word problem."
The boy who'd raised his hand, Alexander, read out the first word problem on the page. "On Friday night, John ate pizza for dinner. He had 1/2 of the pizza left over. On Saturday, he ate 1/3 of the remaining pizza. What did he have when he finished eating?"
America looked at him strangely. "Type two diabetes?" he guessed. "I mean, I'm assuming hypothetical John is the same age as the students the book is marketed to. So he's, what, ten or eleven years old and eats half a pizza in one sitting. He clearly doesn't have the healthiest eating habits, not that I've got any right to preach about healthy eating."
Several students snickered.
"I don't think you can get to that mathematically, though, so I guess we should properly work it out."
"Can you get to a stomachache mathematically?" one of the girls asked.
America considered this. "Um…maybe if you knew how much stomach content equals a stomachache. But I don't know that, and I doubt anyone else does either, so let's just figure out how much pizza he had left instead. We know he had half a pizza before he started eating on Saturday, and he had two thirds of that left after he finished. So what we need to find out is what two thirds of a half is." He wrote the problem on the board. "So we multiply the top row of the problem first. One times two is two, so that's the numerator of the answer. And the bottom row is two times three, which is six. So our answer is two sixths, or one third." He circled the answer on the board, looked at it for a second, then crossed it out and wrote a stomachache, diabetes, or both. "We all know this is the real answer, though. Just don't write that one on the paper. Write the socially acceptable answer, just know that this—" here he tapped the words he'd written on the board "is the actually right one. But do you guys understand how to get to the socially acceptable answer?"
"Not at all. You should do more problems on the board to show us," Alexander said. America gave him a Look.
"I'll do a division problem on the board so that you guys have an example of each, okay? Then you just plug in the different numbers to the example problems. Someone give me a division problem."
"If you want to divide 7/8 pizza between 3 people, how much pizza would each person get?" George Washington called out. America looked confused.
"These are really weird word problems. Why are they all about pizza?" America demanded. "Doesn't anyone eat anything else in the world of math problems? And why are you only dividing seven eighths of a pizza anyway? Why wouldn't you divide the whole pizza? What's the other eighth of the pizza for? Anyone got a suggestion?"
"Maybe they gave it to the dog," George Washington said.
"What, so we're giving the dog diabetes too? Why don't we have any proper dog food? Word problems are insane! But okay, let's give the dog a piece of pizza and divide the rest up between three people, because we're word problem land, so we don't think too clearly." America wrote 7/8 3/1 on the board. "Now, this is division, so we have to flip the second number before we multiply anything, which makes the new problem 7/8 times one third. Then we multiply it out..." America did so, and looked curiously at the answer he got. "That can't be right. Let me try that again," he said, multiplying the numbers a second time, and getting the same answer. He shrugged and turned to the class. "So, we've divided the fractions, and now our new question is who the heck divides a pizza into twenty-fourths, because apparently each person gets seven of them, and seven twenty-fourths doesn't come out to anything simpler than seven twenty-fourths. You know, most people would just divide up the existing number of pieces and if they came out uneven, someone would just say that they're not too hungry, so they don't mind having one piece less. Or else they'd cut the extra piece into thirds or something, but they sure wouldn't divide the pizza into twenty-fourths to make sure that everyone gets the exact same amount of pizza. Nobody cares about dividing things up that equally. I'd hate to see what they do when they find out that the number of ounces of coke in the refrigerator isn't divisible by three. Get out a little eye dropper thing and measure the number of drops of coke to make sure that everyone gets the exact same amount?"
"Well they've got to give the dog some coke too, so maybe that'll make it divisible by three," one of the girls said.
"Oh, right. The dog eats people food. I forgot. Seriously, what is up with word problems? The people in them do the weirdest things. But, okay, now we've got our two examples on the board, so you guys can do the rest by yourselves. Let me know if anyone else does something weird."
And with that, America returned to drawing Superman until the next class began, and the students began to eagerly skim the word problems to find more illogical actions to mock.
Okay, this was updated with absolutely nothing even remotely resembling the "reasonable frequency" I talked about in the last chapter, and I apologize for that. But fortunately I have a fancy schedule hanging over my desk now, so I'm not going to do this again, I promise. Thanks so much for your patience! Also, thank you to the wonderful people who reviewed the last chapter!
So, am I the only one who just doesn't understand why people in word problems do the things they do? Either they divide things up in the strangest ways, or they eat half a pizza at once, or (my personal favorite) they randomly decide to put a handful of gumdrops in a bag and pick out exactly one to eat, when any normal person would either eat the whole handful or just take one to begin with. Probability word problems are weirder than fraction ones sometimes. Why would anyone want to calculate the probability of picking a red gumdrop when they could just eat the gumdrops? Now that I think about it, I really don't know why I had the class work on fractions when I could have had them do probability. I guess I picked the second funniest topic, at least. Oh, and just so you know, I didn't make up the word problems in the chapter. These strange word problems really do exist; I found them online.
According to my fancy schedule (which is actually not fancy at all), I should have the next chapter done by Tuesday. I'd have it done sooner, but I'm multi-tasking: my sister and I have an absolutely massive WWII fanfiction that we're going to post in February, and we're trying to get a chunk of it done before then so that we can work out any problems that arise before we go to publish anything. (Not-so-fun fact: it's annoyingly difficult to find any decent resources on the invasion of Poland.)
Anyway, thanks so much for reading! See you next chapter!
