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 Posted: Sun Sep 05, 2010 6:12 pm
Science had never been her particular strong point. Even when she hadn't been a sailor senshi, she'd never pulled anything higher than a B minus; and then she'd started to fall asleep in class, and had failed her sophomore science class. Which had been agonizing, because while no one said anything to her, it was embarrassing. And she had to retake the course. She might have just taken Chem, and then Bio later--but no, might as well get it out of the way.
That was why she was sitting in Doctor Perry Westerman's bio class last period, hands folded in front of her and green eyes wide as they could be. Today they were learning about cell structure, and she was looking at her notes like they held the secrets to life, the universe, and everything. Everything she'd written down, though, read like some kind of secret code--sanskrit or something, maybe.
So even after the bell rang, she sat there and stared at her notes. The teacher was still cleaning up in the front of the room; uncertainly, she raised her hand, and said, "Dr. Westerman?"
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Posted: Thu Sep 09, 2010 6:29 pm
There was one unfortunate side effect of spending summer in a coma that stood out amongst the countless others, as Dr. Westerman entered his second semester of teaching his biology classes at Meadowview High School: he hadn't had anything resembling a break from teaching. Not only that, but shortly after waking up he realized that he had an abysmally small amount of time to start drawing up lesson plans for everything come the start of the term. This meant that for the time being he had to completely skip the part where he wrestled with Powerpoint to format his classes... but in some ways that was probably a good thing.
Or not. Now instead of fumbling with his technology every hour, he was fumbling with dry erase markers drawing his own diagrams of everything until he came to a point where he had the time to fumble with his technology.
Granted, they were actually pretty readable and informative. At least up until the point where the markers ran low on ink and they got harder and harder to see.
He had an eraser in hand, purging the remains of a wispy red mitochondrion (an equally wispy arrow pointed to it, noting the importance of its infolded membrane) when a student's voice caught his attention and made him jerk back around -- his ponytail flipped up and smacked him lightly on the back of shoulder. Normally when classes were out, that implied the students with them. The new transfer student, however, looked like she was terribly lost and trying to decipher a map written in ancient Chinese.
"What's the holdup, kiddo?" he asked, setting down the eraser for the moment and meandering closer to her desk. "You got a question I never noticed?"
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Posted: Thu Sep 09, 2010 11:31 pm
From other classes, she was well aware the school had technology similar to Crystal's. The projector in each room was easily recognizable from her old school, and she had narrowed her eyes to contemplate why this teacher used the whiteboard instead of the She'd wanted the teacher's attention, and now that she had it she was squirming uncomfortably in her seat, hands in her lap. The expression on her face was pink-cheeked, miserably embarrassed; the green eyes, partially concealed behind the cropped blonde hair, were directed at her notes. A cell is made up of multiple complex structures... Complex was right! This was totally... totally...
"I'm really confused," she said, starting to roll up and flatten the corner of her notebook paper. The handwriting on the page was in a blue-violet gel pen, the same pen that she was nervously tapping against the desk. From her experiences with the science teacher last year, questions were not encouraged. "I... which parts of the cell are which, sir?"
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Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2010 11:18 am
Dr. Westerman blinked once, then twice. He peered back at what he hadn't erased of the board -- a ribosome, a chloroplast and what was now half a mitochondrion -- then back at Elke, an eyebrow fully cocked. "Hang on, now, hold up," he said, and smoothed a hand over his hair. "If I heard you right, you're pretty much asking me to tell you what I just covered this entire class on."
Now the hand was knuckle-rested on his hip, the other resting gently on the edge of Elke's desk. He looked sort of concerned.
"Have you been falling asleep during class often?"
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Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2010 6:48 pm
She looked insulted then. "I didn't fall asleep," Elke said, vehemently, "I sleep at night, 'cause that's when there's nothing to do. A-anyway, I was listening. Ribosomes make RNA into proteins and mitochondria make energy and." She rifled through her notes, the blue-violet ink glittering in the light--how old was she, seriously, eight?--and then she pointed to one definition written in her neat handwriting. "And the nucleus is the brain of the cell. I was awake!"
Point proven, she appeared to deflate again; she carefully put down her pen, rested her chin in one palm. "It's just, I didn't get to copy any of the diagrams," she explained. "Without the diagrams I can't study right... And I can't fail biology again, my parents would get so mad." The blonde girl looked ashamed at that, dropping her hands to flip through her notebook pages. "And I'm confused about the... the endo... thing. With the proteins."
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Posted: Thu Sep 16, 2010 8:33 pm
"I won't lie, that's good to hear," the teacher said, his look easing back into an approachable, though still someone puzzling smile. Then, by means of explaining his assumption, he continued, "Ever since I started teaching here earlier this year, there's been a lot of problems with kids falling asleep in class. It hasn't been just me either, so I know it's not because I'm boring." His lips quirked into a frown for a split second in spite of the joke.
"You're one of the munchkins from that Barren Pines deal, right?" No wonder she was behind, he thought. Nothing could mess with someone's studies like an incredibly abusive fake school. "Anyway, you don't got to worry about getting the diagram drawn in your notes, there's one in the textbook. You can prob'ly also find more in the Google."
Walking back up to the front of the room, he picked up a pen and found a spare piece of paper before returning to Elke, and began to draw a nucleus and the membrane network surrounding it for her to see. "The ER's basically a factory for materials the cell's gonna use later. Since it's right next to the nucleus and a lot of ribosomes live there, the nucleus will send RNA over there to get turned into proteins."
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Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2010 10:34 am
Elke suddenly seemed to be staring at her notebook like it was the most interesting thing in the world. She kind of had a really, really good idea as to why some of those kids had been falling asleep. It was probably--extremely likely--accurate, too, since she knew there were a ton of senshi from the meeting she'd been to. And more of them had to be awakening, too. Her memories of the Silver Millennium involved many more senshi than she could remember seeing at any one point.
"Yeah," she acknowledged, nodding and then looking back up at the question about Barren Pines. Although it wasn't really entirely to blame. If she'd just actually paid attention during spring semester at Crystal she probably would have done okay.
Shifting in her chair to peer at the paper, she mused for a moment over the Google and the various indignities inflicted on her computer by certain of her friends. Hopefully someone had turned off that stupid firewall that wouldn't even let her get on Google. Or any search engine, really. If not, she'd have to go ask Dad or Pop to fix it. Maybe Audrey would help. "So it's sort of a convenience store for proteins," said Elke, who was very taken with this idea and imagining little baby cells or something being given RNA to go get proteins, like kids and ice cream.
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Posted: Tue Sep 21, 2010 8:15 pm
A convenience store for proteins. Now if that wasn't the most charmingly adorable way to conceptualize a cell organelle he had heard, he didn't know what was. "Yeah, I guess you could say that," he mused aloud. "If the RNA's your money, and the ribosome's the lady at the checkout counter. It'll do for this class, anyhow."
Idly, he glanced at the clock, then back at his student. "You got any more questions, kiddo?"
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Posted: Fri Oct 15, 2010 3:29 pm
Elke blushed adorably and hooked her hair behind one ear. "Adorable" really was a good way to describe everything she ever did, but this in particular was pretty notable. She carefully noted down the teacher's additions to her metaphor, mouthing the words. (Her notes were in French, since she had no one to share them with; otherwise she'd be writing in English.)
"No," she said, starting to pack up her things. She was flipping the locks on her backpack when she looked up, caught sight of the projector. "Sir, how come you don't use the projector?"
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