September 20, 2020

I was getting breakfast at the snack bar near the entrance of our school. I had gotten the daily special which was some granola topped with yogurt and fruit. I finished eating right before classes were about to begin as trucks started unloading at the front gate. I had to be careful not to trip over the various ramps and traffic cones as I made my way to class.

My math course was scheduled for Tuesday and Thursday afternoons but more than halfway through the semester I had only attended a handful of classes. The pandemic meant that most of my classes were canceled during the first half of the semester and I just never formed a habit of going to this class in particular after they resumed.

It took me a long while before I managed to find the classroom somewhere on the upper floors. When I got to the lockers outside of the classroom, I realized that I had also forgotten the combination for my lock. I had no choice but to bring everything into the room with me. Before stepping through the door, I took out my daily planner to check what the last assignment was. It was to read a book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez but I never got around to it.

There was a huge sand pit on the far side of the room and my classmates were doing motorbike tricks over the dunes. Apparently they’ve never had a proper math class and had simply been doing random activities for the entire semester.

Our teacher walked up the group and held up a white paperback book titled “1000 Disciples” in his hand while asking who wanted a copy. I raised my hand not knowing what it was - I figured that I might as well take any opportunity to do some extra reading he suggested. I caught the book as he tossed it my way before I turned to ask my classmates if they’ve already read it for class. They looked at me like I was crazy so I looked back at the book at opened it up. It was written in German.

I heard some giggling behind me and turned around to ask what was going on. I was given a sheet of paper outlining was was supposed to be our final assignment for the class. One of the tasks was to write a “μ amount of μ’s” among other seemingly nonsensical questions. It was to be submitted as a “pdfB form” file format. I asked my classmates if there were any definitions of the terms used on the assignment sheet and they simply responded that they didn’t think it was supposed to be taken seriously.