Читать книгу ElsBeth and the Privateer, Book II in the Cape Cod Witch Series - J Bean Palmer - Страница 6

That evening, after a delightful though unusually quiet dinner, Professor Badinoff, ElsBeth’s familiar, spent a whole hour going over the basics of multiplication and division.

For those who don’t know, a witch’s “familiar” is her unique, magical animal friend who helps and protects her, no matter what. And ElsBeth’s familiar was a bat, Professor Badinoff.

The impressive bat was an extraordinary teacher. He had a way of explaining things, especially mathematics, that ElsBeth could understand with no difficulty.

Why couldn’t Ms. Finch be more like Professor Badinoff? Then she started to giggle, picturing Ms. Finch with pointy bat ears and sharp teeth.

ElsBeth slid to the floor and rolled around, shaking with belly laughs. That would be something!

Professor Badinoff cleared his throat. He was an important and renowned intellect, after all, and didn’t often have students rolling on the floor during math lessons. This wasn’t the expected or proper behavior.

“Yes, well, as I was saying …” the professor continued.

Badinoff pointed to the extensive collection of rubber, tree frogs ElsBeth kept in her room. “ElsBeth, count out one hundred frogs, please.”

ElsBeth busily added up the required number of amphibians and placed them around on the hooked rug by her bed.

The professor flew to the slate chalkboard he used for mathematics lessons. He wrote neatly, in fancy script, “100 divided by 5=?”

He then directed ElsBeth to separate the one hundred frogs into five equal piles. ElsBeth divided the tree frogs by color, because she liked the look of it that way, and put the green, brown, purple, orange and red frogs in their own neat rows.

“Now, ElsBeth, count how many frogs are in each group, please,” the professor instructed in his serious teaching voice.

ElsBeth carefully added up the number of frogs in each group, her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth with the effort to keep track. “Twenty! There are exactly twenty in each.”

“Precisely,” said Badinoff. And flapping his wing over the slate, he erased the question mark and wrote “20” in its place. “The quotient is twenty.”

ElsBeth frowned. “What’s a quotient?”

Badinoff smiled, his exceptional ears perking up. “Excellent question, ElsBeth. The word ‘quotient’ comes to us from Latin, an important language for magical beings, by the way.

“In Latin the word means ‘how many times.’ The basic idea is ‘how many.’ So, if you had one hundred frogs, and you wanted to split them up into five groups — so you could have them jump out from all sides and surprise someone, for example — you would have a tidy total of twenty frogs in each group.

“Finding a quotient comes in handy for cooking and spell making, and dividing and placing your troops in any serious battle — just to name a few uses off the top of my head,” he added modestly.

“I would love to have a hundred frogs jump out and surprise Ms. Finch when she’s picking on me. Or at Robert Hillman-Jones when he’s pulling my braids. I never knew mathematics could be so extremely useful.

“Thank you, Professor,” she added respectfully.

Professor Badinoff puffed out his chest and lightly fluttered his wings at the sudden interest he had inspired in his young pupil.

He was about to continue the lesson and get into his favorite Einstein equations when he took a second look at ElsBeth’s shining face. He saw that she had learned something important and that it was time to end off for now.

So instead of diving into the next lesson, the wise bat said, “Well … er … yes. I think that is enough for today. Well done, ElsBeth.”

And with a quick sweep of his wings he erased the board and took off out the window, looking for someone with whom he could debate some of Einstein’s less well understood theories, a favorite pastime when not teaching ElsBeth, or gobbling up some of those tasty New England mosquitoes.