fandomhigh | Home Ec, Tuesday, period 1

The home ec classroom was reasonably well decked out, Eliot was pleased to find. He'd sworn off the Danger Shop for at least the semester, and had been a little worried that this would mean trying to teach the kids how to cook pasta on a hot plate using buckets of water. But the room was lined in little kitchenettes, complete with small fridges, stoves, ovens, and sinks, each with its own set of cabinets full of dishes and cleaning supplies. The center of the room was dominated by long wooden tables, each with ample storage and several electrical outlets set into the floor beneath them, so he wouldn't have to worry about snaking extension cords all over when they got to using sewing machines and the like.

Not half damn bad, if you asked Eliot.

The front of the front of the room had a big friendly white board on it, on which was written "HOME EC" in foot-tall letters, with "Eliot Spencer" in more standard sized letters beneath it. Eliot himself sat behind the teacher's desk with his feet up, reading a book. There was a sheet of instructions at every seat.

"Following instructions is important," said the board. "Please read all instructions on the worksheet before beginning. You have ten minutes."

At the end of the ten minute period for instruction-following, Eliot sat up and put his book aside. "Right. So there's a nice lesson in how schools like to catch you out and make you look silly if you don't do what you're told." He shrugged. "My home ec teacher pulled that on me when I was your age. I think maybe one kid in the class actually did it 'right'. And about five of us smart asses had explanations as to why the 'right way' to do it was wrong." He shrugged. "Welcome to Home Ec. Instructions are gonna be important a lot of the time in here, if nothin' else to keep you from accidentally mixing together poison gas trying to clean your kitchen. But I promise that's the last trick I'm gonna pull on you in here." He walked around to the front of the desk and leaned against it. "It's the first week, so I'm guessin' you all know what that means around here: introductions. Tell me your name, what kind of livin' arrangements you have at home, and what you're hopin' to learn about in this class, please. I'll start us off: I'm Eliot Spencer. You can call me 'Eliot' or 'Mr. Spencer,' whichever you're comfortable with. I live in a four story house on the other side of town with my partners, but I've lived alone most of my adult life, so most of all this stuff was up to me. And I'm apparently gonna end up learnin' to knit with y'all, so I guess that might be fun." He pointed to one of the students. "Now, how 'bout you?"

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"Following instructions is important," said the board. "Please read all instructions on the worksheet before beginning. You have ten minutes."

[In case you can't follow the link in the post:

Find a pen and paper.
Write your name at the top of the paper.
Write the numbers 1 to 5, one per line.
Draw five small circles beside #1.
Put an "X" in the second and fourth circles next to #1.
Write the word 'encyclopedia' beside #3.
On the back of the paper multiply 7 x 9.
Put an X in the lower right-hand corner of the paper.
Draw a circle around the X you just made.
Underline your name.
Say your name out loud.
Draw a circle around #4.
Count the number of words in this sentence and write the answer beside #2 on your paper.
Put a square around #1 and #5.
Punch 3 small holes anywhere in the paper.
Write your first name beside #4.
Write today's date beside #5 on your paper.
Circle every letter 'E' you have written.
Stand up and say 'I HAVE FINISHED FIRST' if you were first, else say 'I HAVE FINISHED' out loud, then sit down.
Now that you read all of the instructions, skip all of them except the first two! If you have followed the instructions correctly, you should only have your name on the paper!]

Lucille was getting more and more annoyed as she read through the instructions. After #2 she stopped following them, because why would she waste her time with something like that?

Which turned out to be to her advantage when she reached the end. She snorted.

Edited 2017-01-03 10:16 (UTC)

Alluka did her best to be a good girl, which was the only reason she read the whole thing first when she got the paper, just in case it was important.

Some of the instructions made her giggle but the last one made her scrunch up her nose in dismay. That wasn't a very nice trick to play on people.

But she ended up with just her name on the paper, like she was supposed to.

"... I was supposed to bring paper?"

Peridot's expertise in the area of relatively normal human classrooms was lacking somewhat. So, while she didn't end up doing everything down the list, she really didn't manage steps one and two, either.

Ada found a second blank sheet of paper in her notebook and ripped it out and passed it to Peridot, along with another sparkly gel pen. "I only got it 'cause I like coloring," she admitted, offering it up. "--I don't even remember th' last time we had t' take notes or whatever."

Admittedly, Ada had a terrible memory. But it wasn't like Fandom was big on writing reports.

... Ada, Peridot was really starting to like you. She made a little 'ooh' sound before reaching to take the offered paper and the sparkly pen, and then stared down at both in fascination.

"Is note taking a standard practice in some classrooms? Before if I wanted to make note of something, I'd just use my screen."

Which was at the bottom of the ocean, now. Which was basically the worst.

"I dunno, I never went to a proper school before," Ada admitted. "We had t' take notes in homeschooling, so we could study for tests, and paper was th' only method we had. Is a screen like a computer?"

"Yes, but better," Peridot said, perking up as she held up one hand, fingers splayed. And then sighing as she gave them a wiggle. Right. "Back when I still had one, anyway. It was a valuable tool for gathering and compiling information."

She lowered her hand again and looked down at her sheet of paper.

"For now, this will do. Thank you."

Ada dug through her bag, making a face, until she finally found a notebook she hadn't doodled over every page out of sheer boredom. Fandom wasn't exactly big on note-taking most of the time.

And Mr. Spencer was just going to have to deal with her name being in red sparkly gel pen.

Hanna managed to suppress her snicker, and was very, very tempted to stand up and claim to have finished first anyway.

Hanna Heller was written across the top, and then, But what if I wanted to write this in blood?

Hanna's sense of humor skewed toward the Grimm.

Hyacinthe was an excellent speaker of Cruith--English--but still a little slow at reading it, complete with his finger following the words and the occasional whisper as he had to sound things out. D'Angeline might be the king of silent letters in words, but English was a close second and there were plenty of words on the page that looked different from the way they were spoken.

Ten minutes wasn't much time to read all of the instructions and then follow them, and he had enough pride to not want to go over the allotment. So he'd started writing along with the instructions until around step seven, when he realized that no one else was still writing. And so he took several more painstaking minutes to read through the instructions and then got out a second piece of paper so he could do the whole thing right.

Blue was a pragmatic creature, so when someone said 'read all the instructions first' she smelled a trap and was sure to read all of the instructions. And yep, there was the trap she'd been looking for. Which would be why all her paper had on it was her name.

Eric's hobby was baking, which he took very seriously, so reading instructions from start to finish was something he made a point to do. He gave an annoyed little huff when he got to the last instruction, but it was far less annoyed than he supposed he would be had he started following the instructions as he read them.

Reading was not Kaylin's strong suit. Not really at all.

But she respected Eliot, so she struggled to read the directions all the way through, which meant she was about at #13 and thinking this was really the craziest thing she'd ever been asked to do by the time the ten minutes was up.

Which meant she hadn't done anything as yet.

And she still had no idea what the word "Ec" meant. She'd spent a fair amount of time thinking about that (along with why in all the hells someone had signed her up for a class about Homes, Ec or not.)

Edited 2017-01-04 23:38 (UTC)

Home Ec, Tuesday, period 1

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