ON HOLD; It's No Fun Being This Smart | ONC2021

Units of Measure

The unicorn looked a lot like in the movies. It had flowy pastel hair, shiney white fur, and a not-too-sharp pink horn. Isla stepped back (she wasn't much of an animal lover.) She couldn't look away. She guessed the unicorn was about 58 inches, Since an inch is 2.54 centimeters, the unicorn was also 147 centimeters tall. Both inches and centimeters are units of distance, so they can measure the distance from the floor to the top of the unicorn; Isla thought that was cool, how you could describe a thing with different numbers and still mean the same thing. Bo kept talking and talking about the Bible stories he had learned. The unicorn neighed and shook its head. As its head shook, glitter appeared around its horn. When it stopped shaking, the glitter floated around and turned into shiny words floating in the air. The words looked like the captions on internet videos. Every time a new set of words appeared, Bo would word them out in the way kindergarteners do.

Li said "Isla, this is Miss Flores. Miss Flores, this is Isla."

Miss Flores turned from Bo to Isla. shook her head. The glitter floated into the words "Nice to meet you, Isla."

"That's a unicorn!" said Isla. "There's a unicorn in this treehouse."

Bo hugged Miss Flores, as though to protect the unicorn. Bo said "Don't worry, teacher. She's just not used to seeing unicorns."

"Sorry," said Isla. She didn't mean to embarass anyone.

Miss Flores laughed and shook her head. Was that a laugh? Isla had never heard a unicorn laugh before. With the letters, she said "It's fine. I don't mind."

Li walked up to touch Miss Flores's head with the back of her hand to get a blessing, as they did with Li's mom earlier. Li smiled at Isla and said "Don't be shy," so even though it felt like something was tugging on her to freeze, Isla came to get a blessing, too.

Isla stepped back.

"Miss Flores is our math tutor," said Li. "She needs to do her job so she can be a human again. Bo and I haven't been doing well with her lessons, so we thought you could try."

"She used to be a human?" asked Isla.

"Yup," said Bo. "She needs to look like one so she can teach in school again. That's what the Magic Man said. She needs to do her job somshe can look like a human and go back to school."

Isla's eyes stretched open. Isla yelled "Magic Man? Who's the Magic Man?"

"Let me explain," said Li. "We don't know who he is, but our mom said that the Magic Man turned Mkss Flores into a unicorn. If Miss Flores does her job, the Magic Man's spell will be broken. We already have our school teachers to teach us regular lessons, so Miss Flores is teachimg us harder stuff. At least, she's trying to. So far we haven't learned much. Our mom said you have the kind of thinking that makes advanced math easier, so our mom said we should ask if you could let Miss Flores teach you. So, will you?"

"Interesting! Of course," said Isla. Isla's hands rushed to cover her mouth. She remembered what happened last time she said 'yes' too quickly. She uncovered her mouth. Words rushed out. "Wait, I need to ask my mom. How would it work? What days would we meet? What time would we meet? Would we meet here everytime? How long would we do it? What would I bring? What if my mom wants to meet Miss Flores?"

Miss Flores smiled, shook her head, and said "One question at a time." Miss Flores shook her head again, creating a chart 2 units wide and 7 units tall. On the first column were the days of the week. On the second column were times. Tutoring happened at 3 o'clock to 4 o'clock of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons. That's 4 hours a week. Isla knew units of measure could work together to give more data. Since each hour has 60 minutes (which is the same as six ten minutes), that's the same as 4 times 6 times 10 minutes, or 240 minutes a week. From experience, Isla knew those minutes wouldn't be exact. Still, it wasn't too big; it was only about 16 hours a month. (A month has approximately 4 weeks, so it's 4 weeks times 4 hours per week.)

Once she had all those numbers in her head, Isla nodded. Then, Isla said, "I'm in, but how do I tell my parents?"

Miss Flores shook hear head and said "Ma'am Jing Chen will take care of that. Shall we begin?"