“And so class, to find the hypotenuse of a triangle, you use the Pythagorean Theorem, which is….well?  Does anybody know? Come on class, you can do better than this!”

Hayden Towers wasn’t listening to Ms. Marks blathering on. It wasn’t that his teacher was boring; in fact she was usually quite fun, other than the fact that she assigns massive amounts of homework. It was just that Hayden got distracted very easily. . He was drawing a picture of a snake going through his name, when a piercing voice shattered his faraway thoughts.

“Hayden, do you know what the answer is?” his teacher asked him. “Or were you daydreaming again instead of paying attention? You know you learn valuable life skills from math and if you want to…” Hayden started to nod off. He could never really pay attention in class because everything was just too boring. There are other things he could be doing right now, and school isn’t one of those.

“Hayden! Were you listening to me? You have to get your head in the game,” she joked. She grabbed a piece of paper, crumpled it up, and tossed it toward his head. It was heading right for him, when it just veered to the left of him all of a sudden. It was odd, because she usually never missed, but it didn’t really matter to him.     

“Just 20 more minutes,” Hayden thought to himself, “and then the February vacation begins!”

“Okay, I guess I’m going to have to assign extra homework for tonight, because it seems like nobody understood most of today’s lesson.” An unanimous groan spread throughout the class. “Settle down, and stop complaining! If you had paid more attention, this wouldn’t have happened! Now, I want you all to-“.

Ms. Marks’ phone suddenly went off. She tore her phone out of her pocket before the first ringer tone could finish. She stared at her phone for a moment, and the her face quickly melted to an expression of curiosity and the slightest bit of fear.

“Hold on children, I have to take this,” Ms. Marks exclaimed. “For now you all can just start tonight’s homework”. She hurriedly shuffled to the door to the classroom, and then left the classroom, leaving with a firmly slammed door. As soon as she left the room, the room exploded with talking. There was no chance that anyone was going to be doing homework; Ms. Marks should have known that. Everybody was talking to someone, drawing, or some other random pastime.