Utopia Dragon: The Alien Monk and the Vogue New School

Chapter 3

A glass-domed alarm serving as the Small World school bell buzzed off at one o'clock to announce the next period. Inside a classroom auditorium stationing rows of curvature fixed tables, a rotund man with glasses, a mustache, bow tie, and checkered socks hosted the algebra class to which Omi, Clay and Raimundo belonged. (The trio was late on arrival, after having to fetch their backpacks from the dormitory.) The teacher's whiteboard spanned nearly the entire wall the freshmen confronted; per first-day nightmare, it was cluttered with streams of equations.

"Mm, alrighty. Seeing that our three missing students are finally present, welcome to algebra," the teacher began in a nasal voice as he paced the rostrum. "For any of you fledglings who've been dawdling the last few years of this last century, math is THE most important subject you'll take in our number-crunching era. Believe me - " he bobbed his glasses with a touch of pretension, "I used to be an accountant for the World Exchange petrobankers. That is... until they fired me on the absolutely ludicrous claim I was 'cooking the books.'" He wheezed as he composed himself in front of the class. "...But the past is to be filed under 'irrelevant.' Today we'll begin by solving an equation." Signs of disengagement multiplied among the teenagers. "Now-now, don't sulk - I'll walk you through the steps but you'll have to keep up. Once I get going I NEVER slow down." With a twiddle of his foot he spun to the digital wall-sized whiteboard, erased its clutter magically by swiping his hand across its motion sensor, and picked a virtual marker from the board tray.

At a mid-tier table, Omi was sitting between Raimundo and Clay, armed with an open notebook and number two pencil. "Hm," the monk examined the pencil's flat tip, "I will require this to be pointier." So, he took out a manual pencil sharpener and twisted the thing inside it. Clay tap-tap-tapped a pen on his chin as he hovered over his notebook, while Raimundo dialed his music player and let the headphones on his ears beat a more tolerable sound.

After fiddling with his marker, the teacher tottered around, revealing an equation.

6x - 4 = 8

"Hrm, that should be easy, I presume?" His eyes sifted the room, tongue-in-cheek.

A duo of white American dudes at a low-end table reacted to the numbers on the board as though the math problem wanted to hurt them.

"Man I hate numbers!" complained one of them to the other. "Them and those letters are always mocking me in my report cards!"

"Shhh! Don't mention our report cards!" The other dude seized his scalp. "I'm already FREAKING OUT!"

(And thus it was transparent as to who wouldn't last the first quarter.)

Omi jotted the equation in his notebook. He went "Hah!" when he finished. Clay adjusted his cowboy hat at the whiteboard, while Rai kept his eyes keenly shut as he lapsed into his music.

"Let's find the value of our x. Step one," the teacher readied his marker, "isolate the term six x by adding the constant four to both sides of the equation." He did exactly that. The "4" canceled out "- 4" on the left, but on the right, it was added to the "8" for a sum of "12."

"Step two, divide the coefficient six by itself to isolate x, and divide twelve by it." He performed the operation.

Omi glanced up and down as he copied the teacher's writing. He tried following along mentally, but was stumped when the teacher reached the quotient "2" after dividing the dividend "12" by the divisor "6." He sprang a brow at the solution "x = 2" on his notebook paper. Clay in the meantime oversaw him, amiss to his confusion.

Having intuited said confusion, the teacher advised his students. "If division is too hard for you, Heaven forbid, check the answer via multiplication." Apart from the "x = 2" on the board he marked: "6 x 6 = 12." "Six is multiplied how many times to make twelve?" He appended "2."