InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "now this is getting silly"

Akuba Maeko (giantfruitbyday) wrote in disappear_rpg,
@ 2009-10-22 20:46:00

Entry tags:

maeko, renju

Who: Maeko, Renju
What: Studying
Where: The Library
When: Thursday
Why: Because Maeko isn't really all that smart.

No student council, no work. Thursdays were pretty boring days as far as Maeko's schedule went. Right now it was good to have an excuse to not go back to her room and studying was as good an excuse as any.

She tapped her pen against the worksheets, waiting for Renju. She was glad to be able to move her hands a little, even if it did mean having to write again. He palms were still bound but her fingers were free enough to write.

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lotus_beyond
2009-10-22 10:09 pm UTC (link)

"Oh, Heron's formula." Renju opened her notebook to a clean page and started sketching out triangles and circles and numbers, everything small and neat and probably incomprehensible to anyone but her. "It's all based on circles..." she began before launching into a somewhat rambling explanation.

She really wasn't used to explaining things, at all, so it was all rather awkward. It seemed to make much more sense in her head than it did coming out of her mouth...

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giantfruitbyday
2009-10-22 10:20 pm UTC (link)

And Maeko didn't understand a word of it. But it would be rude to ask Renju to explain again, right? And she'd look more stupid than she already did. She smiled and nodded and pretended it all made sense, drawing triangles in her notebook to illustrate just how much sense it clearly made to her. Maybe she could ask Kanaye or check on the internet or...well, or something.

"Thank you." She said, nodding.

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lotus_beyond
2009-10-22 10:29 pm UTC (link)

It... sort of looked like Maeko was getting it. Maybe. It was hard for Renju to tell, really, not having done this before. Still, she'd been on the receiving end of this enough times to know that there was one surefire way to find out.

In a slightly larger hand, down near the bottom, she sketched out a triangle, neatly labeling all three sides with numbers and setting an 'x' in the center. "Solve for x." Sure, it sounded a bit brusque, but that was the way she'd learned, so it ought to work for others, right?

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giantfruitbyday
2009-10-22 10:49 pm UTC (link)

Oh. She hadn't expected to be tested.

Maeko stared at the paper. Then frowned at it. Then tapped her pen against it. They dedided that she was agry with it and began scribbling furiously, trying to split the whole thing into smaller parts she understood. Or just smaller parts, anyway.

Okay. brackets first. Work out what's in the brackets first. Oh, but before that she needed to work out what s was. And how exactly did you calculate a square root anyway?

After about four minutes of alternating mad scribbles and frantic pen clicking the papers was full and an answer was at the bottom. An incorrect answer, she'd forgotten that things next to each other meant to multiply them in instead written it as one long number.

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lotus_beyond
2009-10-22 11:02 pm UTC (link)

While Maeko scribbled away, Renju fished out another notebook and, opening to a blank page, worked on the problem herself. Being familiar with the concept and better with numbers, it took her less time to work out the answer for herself, and she finished double-checking it right as Maeko wrapped hers up.

She pulled the notebook back over to her, looked at the answer, frowned, and starting working her way down through Maeko's calculations. It was a lot less organized than her neat, orderly lines of numbers, and she struggled a bit to follow it, but eventually she came to a point where there was a clear mistake. "Here." She tapped on it with her eraser. "What did you do here?"

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	giantfruitbyday 2009-10-22 11:07 pm UTC (link)
	Maeko looked at the paper. She hadn't managed to catch a glimpse of Renju's work but it was clear she'd probably got it wrong. "I figured out what s was and what was in the brackets and then I wrote them all next to each other." She said, nodding. "Because all the brackets were next to each other." (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

lotus_beyond
2009-10-22 11:21 pm UTC (link)

Renju actually looked puzzled for a moment. That wasn't a mistake she remembered ever making, so how could...

"Oh. The brackets being next to each other means that you multiply the contents." She marked little stars in between each set, then wrote the corrected result of that step next to what Maeko had done. "The multiplication's usually left out because it's understood."

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giantfruitbyday
2009-10-22 11:29 pm UTC (link)

"Oh."

Oh?

Oh.

...Well that explained a lot about her maths grades for the last few months.

Maths was stupid anyway.

Stupid subject or not, she took the paper back and on a clean page (since there was no room on that one) re-did the rest of the problem from that mistake. The answer she produced this time was correct, though it did take her a while and whole blocks of incorrect answers were crossed out.

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lotus_beyond
2009-10-22 11:42 pm UTC (link)

This time Renju watched over her shoulder, waiting patiently for Maeko to work her own way through the process. She nearly spoke up a few times, but since it seemed like Maeko was noticing all her own mistakes, there wasn't really a need for it.

Once she was done, Renju took the notebook page and compared it to her own. Cross-outs and missteps aside, the two were similar, and the answers matched up. She gave a satisfied nod, passed the notebook back, and, after a moment's thoughtful silence, added one thing that the cram school teachers she was emulating unconsciously tended to neglect sometimes. "Right. Good work, Akuba-san."

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giantfruitbyday
2009-10-22 11:56 pm UTC (link)

"Hey, it's right?" Maeko really shouldn't have been quite that surprised about that. She nodded cheerfully to herself and grinned. Victoly, except not in allcaps.

Small celebration of not being a total failure done with, she looked over her paper again, trying to figure out the basic steps she'd done to end up with the correct answer. Is she could memorize how she'd done it this time she might be able to replicate it.

"Thank you!" She said, more honestly this time.

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	lotus_beyond 2009-10-22 11:59 pm UTC (link)
	Renju bowed her head slightly to acknowledge the thanks and flipped her notebook to a blank page. It looked like Maeko had really gotten it this time... though that wouldn't keep her from potentially springing it on her in a later session. If there was one. The idea that there might be surprised her a bit. "Is there anything else you want to go over?" (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

giantfruitbyday
2009-10-23 12:14 am UTC (link)

Maeko dug through her pile of handouts. Actually that mistake accounted for a whole lot of her difficulties with this subject. Difficulties that weren't related to being infuriatingly slow and easily confused when it came to numbers, anyway.

"I think that's everything I have the handouts for. Did they go through anything new while I was absent or was it all just going through the old stuff?"

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	lotus_beyond 2009-10-23 01:52 am UTC (link)
	"Mostly review. I can lend you my notes if you think it might help." Said notes were, again, incomprehensible to anyone but Renju, but that didn't stop her from making the offer. "I need to stay focused on English for now anyway." Just thinking about it made her cringe; she'd have to put in extra study time tonight to try to keep up... (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

giantfruitbyday
2009-10-23 02:15 am UTC (link)

Maeko shook her head. Things Renju wrote down didn't seem to be very helpful. "Um, I think I'll be okay. I got photocopies of the handouts..."

She had been meaning to go on to say that she'd ask the teacher if she got stuck but that was an absolute lie. She considered offerring to help Renju with english, which was one of her better subjects, but stopped herself when she realized that Renju's result on the last english test was higher than hers.

"Are you having trouble with english? You could ask Sagaki-san for help. He's from overseas so he probably speaks it natively, right?" She suggested instead.

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lotus_beyond
2009-10-25 11:24 pm UTC (link)

"Probably," Renju mused, remembering their encounter in the library. He'd passed her that book in English--'Paradise Last', wasn't it? Something related to Paradise, anyway. "I'm taking fighting lessons with him currently, though. I don't want to have to use him for both." Not to mention that she should be able to do this herself anyway, but she wasn't going to admit that.

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