Walking into the math class, the teacher glanced around with some trepidation. Occasionally having to be a substitute had recently become part of his job, but walking into a math class was always accompanied by a certain amount of fear. It wasn’t that he was lacking in math skills. A quick look at his college transcripts would have shown a long list of A’s in all the requisite math classes; but that was long ago, not quite in a galaxy far, far away, but at least in a previous century.

“I only hope they are covering things I remember,” the substitute thought. That would, of course, not be likely as the first class of the day was a seventh grade class. Some might scoff at his concern, but the math today’s seventh grade students are asked to do is far beyond what he had faced many years ago.

Stepping the rostrum, he cleared his throat loudly to gain the classes attention.