Euclid Saves the Day

Far away, in a little math room in a town called Montrose, lived a little man named Euclid. Euclid was one inch tall and one inch wide so he was a very little man. Euclid lived in the math teacher’s file cabinet along with all the students’ tests and homework. He used her calculator cover as a bed and a Kleenex as a blanket. This math teacher had many plants spread out around her room so she used a little beaker to water them. Euclid used this beaker as his bathtub instead. He built a tree house in one of the plants next to the file cabinet so he could play in it and watch the students work during the school day. After the final bell rang and the students and teacher left, Euclid would venture out on his own to explore the math room. He would find two pencils and tie them to his feet and use them as stilts. He would skate across the teacher’s overhead projector. He would scale down the desk like it was a large mountain in the Himalayas. Even though these activities were all fun to do, Euclid liked one activity the best of all. Do you know what that was? Studying! Euclid loved to study. As hard as that seems, he would look at Algebra books for hours on end. He loved Geometry most of all, but to him all math was cool! He could count by 5’s, 10’s, 20’s, and he even knew the square root of 225! He loved looking at triangles, squares, and circles. He studied so hard that he was about as smart as the teacher! This fact would come in handy.

One day, the teacher was gravely ill, with Pythageria, and had to stay at home. The principal couldn’t find a sub, and he was worrying what he would do. He looked high and low for a substitute teacher, but he couldn’t find one. He went into the math room to tell the students that there would be no Algebra today because there was no available teacher to be found. He could just imagine the sad faces the students would have because he knew how much they loved Algebra. Then, he heard a small cry from the file cabinet. It was Euclid! The principal went over to investigate this cry when all of a sudden he saw this little man. Euclid told the principal that he knew enough Algebra to teach the students. At first the principal wasn’t sure if the little man was joking or not, so he decided to stay and watch the little man teach the Algebra class. Euclid yelled as loud as he could when he was teaching. This sounded more like a whisper, but the students made sure to remain quiet when Euclid was speaking. The principal was so impressed that he decided to hire Euclid to teach Algebra for the day, to the delight of the students! Euclid taught all six math classes that day, and by the end of the day, no one even knew the real math teacher was gone. Euclid watched the students leave the room and he went back to his file cabinet to relax from the day’s teaching. Euclid was very tired after all that teaching so he went to bed extra early. He dreamt about teaching Algebra and Geometry to the students and all the fun he had that day. He was so tired he didn’t even hear the math teacher open up the file drawer that morning and to her amazement here was this little man. They both jumped in surprise! She then realized that Euclid was her sub for the day before. She told him how happy she was that her students had a good substitute teacher to teach them their studies. Euclid told the teacher that he loved teaching, and he wished he could do it every day. This gave the teacher an idea. She proposed that maybe he could help her teach her classes. This made Euclid jump up in the air one whole foot! The teacher told him he could start that day. From that day on, Montrose has had two math teachers.

The End

Contact me: Cindy.Kroon@k12.sd.us