Laying on the floor, Marcie groaned at the paper under her head. She’d been trying, for the better part of half an hour, to try and do the work but it was proving to be more difficult than she believed. “Okay, I’m wanting to throw this thing in the garbage and pretend I never got the spreadsheet. How in the world are we supposed to do this?”
She turned toward Elaine and shoved the paper at her face with the smallest amount of grace in the world. “Look at this! There’s at least four letters there and powers attached to half of the whole numbers. Apparently there’s a decimal somewhere? Elaine. This is ridiculous, why can’t we have normal maths that can be used in real life? This doesn’t look like that type of math.
Elaine backed away from the sheet that had been shoved into her face. She reached up and pushed it away so that she could see clearly. “No, it’s not your average, daily life math,” she agreed, putting her own homework aside. “But math always follows a logical pattern, and this isn’t any different. To me, this math is designed to help us think logically, to follow a pattern, and to be able to solve a problem; not necessarily that we should know what the quadratic equation is for our job.”
She tapped her pencil against her chin briefly, thinking about how she wanted to go about attacking this problem. “We did get hard homework,” she admitted. “It’s a little unfair, but we have to at least try...”
