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Chapter 4: (Math) Problems

The next day passed rather uneventfully. None of them had much to do that day, and so they all just decided to take a break. Anya had been running around the house with Bond for a while, so Yor took her out so that some of her energy would be lost and she would be able to sleep that night. Kiyotaka continued reading, but left his room to do so and sat on the couch so that he could have a view of the window. It was raining, not yet cold enough to snow, but it would be coming soon. He glanced out the window briefly and witnessed Anya stepping directly into a giant puddle and getting her socks wet. They returned soon after due to that mess. Loid also left the house after a period of time, followed by Yor around 30 minutes later. They had left Anya in his care. Apparently she was a troublemaker so that could disrupt his focus.

Suddenly, Anya came up to him with a pencil and her math homework in hand. “Anya needs help.”

He set down his book, “You want me to help?”

“You said you were good at math,” she was talking in short sentences to him for whatever reason, but he didn’t mind. He wasn’t much of a teacher but he had been trying to learn how to teach for quite some time. Horikita would probably argue that he already was in some ways, but in his opinion he wasn’t particularly good at it.

“Alright, bring your stuff to the table and I’ll see how I can help.” Kiyotaka sat on the floor so that he could get on level with the coffee table and began to look over her homework. He wasn’t really sure what would be a normal level of difficulty for a first grader, but apparently this was supposed to be difficult. He kept that in mind for later. She had already tried to solve many of the problems on the page with much difficulty, only getting an average of around 3/10 right. It almost reminded him of how the idiot trio did on the test before the first midterm. He didn’t blame her though, she was a child and hadn’t learned to study yet.

“Anya is not an idiot!” She yelled that unprompted.

“Huh? Did I do something? I’m sorry,” he was extremely confused. Was this how children acted? It was almost as if she heard the comment about the idiot trio in his mind.

“Uh… Anya just didn’t want you getting the wrong idea.”

“Well, let’s just start from the first problem you got wrong…” He began to explain her error, but it didn’t feel like she was picking up on it at all. He went to get another piece of paper so that he could demonstrate if needed. After showing the method with an example problem so that she could learn on her own, she suddenly wrote down the answer on the page out of nowhere. She didn’t show any work or anything, just wrote down a number that ended up being correct.

Usually Anya was able to copy the steps that the people in her class used to get to each solution through her telepathy, but Kiyotaka’s thoughts were far too fast for her to read and made her slightly dizzy. She gave up looking for the steps at a point and just decided to put the answer.

“Where’s your work?”

“Anya solved it in her head.”

“But what if you made an error in your head? Then you wouldn’t have the work to figure out where you went wrong.” She started at the paper for second. “Show your work for the problem.” She tried the method that he had written down and referenced the example problem in order to make sure she was following the steps correctly. She got the answer wrong the first time. “Try to figure out where you made an error on your own. If you can’t find it I’ll help.” He wanted to give Anya a degree of initiative to find it, and she eventually did it with some searching. After redoing the parts she messed up she arrived at the correct answer.

For the next hour, Kiyotaka did his best to teach her what she could and allowed her to find the answer for herself. It would be more helpful for her later on if she could.