Work Text:
The rain lashed down around Rose as she walked. She cowered under her umbrella and pulled the front of her coat tight around her. A passing car drove through a puddle; Rose lowered her umbrella to block the spray, but still ended up with wet ankles.
She made it to the local library and headed upstairs to the reading room. She sat down at a desk and got out her Maths textbook and workbook. The place was even quieter than usual. Usually there would be some people chatting in hushed voices, but today there was just one young man leafing through the history books. Apparently the rain had put most people off. But Rose’s GCSEs were approaching, and she needed to study hard. She usually did her homework under her duvet, by torchlight, but that wasn’t working out too well for her.
If she wanted to do A Levels, then she needed five GCSEs. She already had one: school had entered the whole year into a multiple-choice Science exam at the end of Year 10, and she’d scraped a C when she resat it in January. In her mock exams, she’d only passed General Studies, Food Tech, and Drama. That would mean four GCSEs if she repeated that in June. Not enough.
At first, Rose thought that she could just boost her D in Art to a C by learning a bit of the art history that her teachers were always blabbing on about. That dream was shattered when Sandra pointed out that she needed at least a C in either Maths or English to continue to Sixth Form. Rose hated English. The thought of reading a whole book and then commenting on the author’s use of imagery or themes or whatever was too much for her. Maths wasn’t much better, but at least there weren’t essays. She was much closer to passing it: she got a D in her mock, compared to a U in English.
Today Rose had a long piece of homework on indices and surds. The boys in her class laughed at that name, and Rose had laughed along with them. Truthfully, though, surds made no sense to her. She could rattle through a few questions on square roots without too much difficulty, but once she got beyond that, things got too hard. She drummed her fingers on the table. She made a stab at the answer, but what came out just looked like nonsense to her. She tried again, but… no. She didn’t even understand the question. She grabbed at fistfuls of hair in frustration and groaned.
“You alright there?”
Rose looked up. It was the young man she’d seen in the history section. He was mid-twenties, with a prominent chin, and wearing a tweed jacket and a bow tie.
“Er, yeah, I’m alright, thanks,” said Rose, suddenly much more self-conscious. Why was he talking to her?
“Ah, GCSE Maths,” said the man. “I remember that. I’m a Maths teacher. I could help you.”
“You’re a Maths teacher? Where do you teach?” asked Rose. Her Mum had warned her to be careful of strange men who claimed to be teachers.
“Oh, here and there. Spent a year teaching in Greece. Now, I move about a lot.”
“You’re a supply teacher?”
“In a way, I suppose I am.” He smiled gently. Rose realised that she trusted this man. She could hear her mother screaming at her that the ones who seem trustworthy are the ones you’ve really got to look out for. That advice evaporated on contact with reality. This teacher was a good one.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“You should call me Mr Smith,” he said. “Don’t tell me your name, that would be inappropriate. Now, what are you having trouble with?”
Rose slid her worksheet over to Mr Smith.
33√8
“Ah, I see where you’re having trouble. The small number isn’t an index on the three, it gives the power of the root. This is asking you for three times the cube root of 8.”
“So the cube root of 8 is… 2?” Rose said, biting her lip.
Mr Smith nodded and slid the sheet back to Rose. “And then times that by three…”
Rose wrote down her working and the answer, six. Then Mr Smith guided her through the rest of the questions, which mixed in fractions, decimals, order of operations, and even a bit of algebra.
“Right, there we go,” said Mr Smith. “Has that helped?”
“Yeah, loads,” said Rose. “It all makes much more sense now. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said, standing up to go. “Good luck in your exam.”
“Wait,” said Rose. “Could you… could you help me with trigonometry?”
He smiled at her again, the same gentle smile. “What seems to be the problem?”
“You sure? You’ve not got… somewhere to be?”
“Oh, nowhere I’m in a rush to get to. Right, so, the thing you’re going to want to remember is soh cah toa. If you’ve got the length of the side opposite the angle and you need the hypotenuse, or vice versa, then you need to use the sine function…”