In the meantime, the sports lovers see an improvement to both basketball teams, with the boys, while not being the best, and the girls’ basketball team, led by Heather, dominating the 3A district 3 and with Cora playing better, alongside Audrey. However, the VA fanbase still had its attention torn between basketball, mathletics and quiz bowl.
By the end of LQBA Winter, in which the A-team wins, and the B-team still fell short of a HSNCT berth, Pablo and Audrey come together as they return home from the tournament.
“Because our pre-calculus semester final is on Monday, I’d say that we study for it tonight, at my place. I also invited a few of my football teammates to study for it, even though they’re no longer playing, I owe that to them”
“Who exactly?” Audrey asks.
“Finn, Heath and Orson. Finn will also bring Carrie along. And I will prepare dinner for you tonight as well; they will come after dinner!” Pablo answers his girlfriend.
When they return from Southside, an hour later, the coach drops them off at Pablo’s home. After they enter Pablo’s home:
“While I’m busy cooking dinner, please study whatever you think you need most outside of pre-calc…” Pablo instructs Audrey.
“This means AP US Government. This is on Monday, too, but everyone else in that course seem to study for it on their own”
“Speaking of which, some football players expressed interest in taking it in winter” Pablo tells her while he peels the onions for dinner.
As Pablo prepares the onions for dicing, he then prepares to boil over chickpeas while they review the earlier stages of AP US Government together.
“What were the main problems with the Articles of Confederation that the Constitution sought to solve?” Audrey asks him while Pablo is preparing the bacon.
“It made the government too decentralized, making it dependent on the states for funding, while also being unable to regulate trade, foreign policy and the military. And Tanith broke our ears about the history of Congress, but any measure required a supermajority of nine votes to pass, and amending the Articles required unanimous consent”
“What solutions were given out?” Pablo’s dad, clueless about that area of US history, asks the couple.
Then the couple talks about various aspects of the Constitutional Convention that several Federalist Papers attempted to address individually: checks and balances, bill of rights, judicial review to name the main ones.
“What do you mean, Tanith broke you guys’ ears about the history of Congress?” Pablo’s mom asks the couple. “Also, what did the Convention do about Congress?”
“The Connecticut Compromise is the basis of today’s Congress, with the House being allocated seats by population, and the Senate with two votes each per state” Audrey answers the question of Pablo’s mom.
“When I said Tanith broke our ears, she kept yakking about all of what that implies for the Tenth Amendment, senatorial filibustering, gridlock and the like” Pablo answers his mom.
Shoot! It’s only now that I realize that I had a role in creating a social studies monster! Playing Congress did the rest, Pablo keeps to himself while he is cooking the bacon prior to dicing.
Cooking the bacon had the consequence of leaving some fat as it melted, so he had to ensure he had just enough fat to cook minced onions with as he continues to review the material of the course, such as civil rights and freedoms, media and campaign financing.
“From the looks of it, this semester’s AP US Government section appears to be one of the strongest in recent memory” Pablo’s dad comments on his son’s description of life in the course.
“How could you even gauge the strength of a given section? Do you discuss that sort of stuff with parents of other football players? There were only two footballers in my section!” Pablo’s face turns red as he finishes stirring the onions in the skillet.
As much as it might be the most competitive academic environment in southwest Louisiana, never in my life I would have imagined someone outside school personnel to keep track of year-on-year section-level performance in a course! It may very well be a strong section in VA’s context, but he doesn’t have access to the data, Pablo sighs while he sprinkled cilantro on a pot containing his pelekie zirni.
“Last time I ever heard about such things happening in AP US Government, VA was in the running for the debate nationals. Right now, we aren’t, even with Tanith steadily improving” Pablo’s dad retorts.
“How common was it for past football players to even take AP US Government in the first place? I never asked them for help in that course, but we never talked about coursework except when someone needed help! George could always ask Lilina whenever he needed help in it”
“Much more often than other APs, at least outside of language arts”
“Dinner is ready!” Pablo then sets the table with the pelekie zirni pot in the center.
“Yay! Pelekie zirni!” Audrey exclaims upon helping herself to pelekie zirni.
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“Pelekie zirni? What is the meaning of this?” Pablo’s mom asks her son, rolling her eyes.
“Let’s say that Aija gave the whole team the recipe for it after her team lost that playoff game, and then I gave it to him after he ate it” Audrey explains to Pablo’s parents.
“There is no name for this dish in English, so we both call it by its Latvian name!”
Ah yes, the Courland Basket. She must have given the recipe to the mother of the host family as well; Audrey is reminded of the person who even gave her the recipe.
“It’s a little bland…” Pablo’s dad tells him.
“No added salt; the bacon is already salty enough as it is, and better too little salt than too much. I know that salt-free restaurants are commercially viable, but the problem is the law”
“Pablo, on what level is the law the problem with salt-free restaurants?” Pablo’s dad asks.
“Jurisprudence to be exact, but food labeling was the core issue in the court case that led to salt-free restaurants being ruled illegal to run”
And it’s viable because the customers with the money these days tend to lean older and may not be able to cook as they used to, Pablo’s mom starts thinking about the economics of healthy restaurants. They can say their food is healthy without telling customers why.
“Even though it may not necessarily be that salty, do you like it otherwise?” Pablo asks Audrey. “I knew you liked pelekie zirni”
“As you told your parents, better low-salt than high-salt. Probably our lives as athletes doing that to the both of us”
After they are done eating the pelekie zirni, they kiss each other before the bell rings. Now you know about how I even cooked pelekie zirni in the first place, Pablo, Audrey starts thinking while the kiss is interrupted by the doorbell being rung.
“Hi Carrie, hi Finn!” Pablo greets the two inside, not having seen Finn outside of school after the defensive end broke his leg against Iowa. He’s still in crutches…
Carrie can’t help but feel like Finn must be cautious so as to not jeopardize his recovery, even though he’s in the later stages.
“Because I couldn’t play football anymore, all I could do is buckle down and study. Carrie dragged me here” Finn then has Carrie help him into the house.
And then comes Heath and Orson, the other people taking pre-calculus who asked for Pablo’s help in that area. As they get into the living room:
“Before we begin, I believe you need to address your biggest weaknesses. What do you guys feel like you struggle most with?”
“Trigonometry and vectors!” Carrie tells the couple, before reading review problems.
It seems like the other two also struggle with that area of pre-calculus. I guess, better start from the top, Pablo starts with the very basics of trigonometry, what sohcahtoa means, and all students take chemistry (or calculus, depending on the version).
“Best advice to tackle trig identity problems: reduce the initial terms to sines and cosines first!” Pablo adds.
“What to do when you want to deal with a plus or minus one outside a fraction and you have a fraction?” Heath asks them.
“You can always see the one as simply the numerator is the same as the denominator” Audrey tells Heath before he goes any further.
Which makes it easier for Heath to tackle trig identity problems, but Carrie has another set of issues, when she gets to another problem. Which is about inverse trig functions.
“Is arc tan the same as tan to the minus one?” Carrie asks, confused about the review problems on inverse trig functions. “Sometimes I see a problem asking for arc tan and tan to the minus one at others”
“On your calculator, or phone, it will say sin, cos or tan to the minus one, but what it will really calculate isn’t some quantity you can multiply by the sine, cosine or tangent respectively and you’ll then get one” Audrey attempts to explain to Carrie.
“I really hope that they will be consistent about x to the minus one and arc x on the exam…” Orson sighs, when he is also faced with the same issue.
“When in doubt about notation, class notes have priority over exercises, especially since the exercises appear to be drawn from different sources” Pablo tries to clear up the confusion, showing a past exam from the same instructor.
“So it seems like sin, cos or tan to the minus one is the same as arc sin, arc cos or arc tan respectively” a bulb flashes in Carrie’s mind. “Now I see where my issues lie!”
Then they keep working on some inverse trig function problems, along with other trig stuff. But then, as they work through a review problem on vectors, they start wondering if there’s anything wrong.
“So we’re given an initial speed of thirty meters per second in the x direction, but they only give us a force in the x direction, while we’re given an acceleration in the y direction!” Finn complains about the problem’s lack of clarity. “How are we to deal with the horizontal force?”
“Yeah, I’m lost!” Carrie adds.
“On that count, if you want the acceleration in the x direction, are we given a mass? If so, divide the force by the mass!” Pablo asks Finn.
“I wonder if anyone here is taking physics, this starts sounding far too much like a physics problem!” Heath complains.
“OK, for the record, here are some equations that would be of use for that sort of problems” Audrey then shows the four some equations from the AP Physics textbook in use at VA that are relevant to the problem.
More specifically, the velocity and position of an object if the acceleration and initial velocity are known. They are made to feel like they are learning kinematics together. And, to a lesser extent, dynamics.
“Now we understand better what vectors are used for. Motion…” Heath sighs.
“There are times when a math notion makes much more sense when you learn something that uses it outside of a math course. Like, you know, composite interest earlier this year for exponentials and logarithms, and kinematics now…” Finn comments on his learning of math.
“Yeah, the teacher kind of took for granted that we could learn Newton’s Second Law in parallel!” Orson laments and then sighs.
They then keep doing pre-calculus, with an emphasis on the interplay between trigonometry and vectors. With a little bit of vector geometry to top it off.
Once the four leave their home, after Orson paid $40 to the couple to help them, they feel like something is off.
“Why is it that you never seem to invite me over to help the male basketball players with their coursework, while there were times during the football season where you would come to the football team’s aid? Notwithstanding the difference in roster sizes of course” Pablo asks.
“You said it so yourself that roster sizes made a difference. This year, especially after Cora started playing quiz bowl, Cora seemed to have been around the boys’ team more”
“That’s true!” the cold, hard truth of Cora’s romantic life resurfaces in Pablo’s mind. “She’s dating Malcolm, and he’s the starting point guard! Speaking of which, he’s good on the block and rebound, but not very good with the ball, so if he has any kind of future in sport, I’d say it’s going to be as a FS”
“Now there are two brainiacs playing hoops for VA, Cora and me! However, I feel like she traded away the physical rigors of track for pressure to get the VAs’ a second HSNCT berth!” Audrey exclaims. “How cute of you to prepare pelekie zirni and make your parents sample it!”
“It’s a bit late to tell me that…”