I walk into marching brand practice in 9th grade. A couple of juniors are scribbling homework questions. I take a peek, seems easy.

We finish practice, and they try to take another crack at factoring this quartic. One of them shares a class with me, and she asks me to do to do the problem. This particular one could be factored using usub (there were no odd powers of x), so I did in like 30 seconds.

And they all stared at me like I’d shown them god.