fic: Nobody Wants To Be Here
NOBODY WANTS TO BE HERE
(Or, Mikey Way is the Worst TA Ever)
Mikey/his ineptitude, plus gratuitous background Ray/Bob, Frank/Gerard, Mikey/Pete/Gabe; AU; PG-13
2700 words.
Summary: Mikey finds the letter with the details of his TAship for the next term in his mailbox in the department two weeks before Christmas. By a different, nastier, twist of fate, he ends up with one of the ten sections for first-year calculus for non-majors.
Notes: sociofemme and ubixtiz were useful to the writing of this story! I am going to fail my seminar if I don't stop writing fic instead of term paper! I swear that this doesn't all come from personal experience.
ETA As of May 31, this story now has a sequel! Took My Heart and Crossed It is 21,000 words, R-rated, and I think you should read it! [/shameless plug]
By some twist of fate (if by "twist of fate" you mean "he's so desperate to avoid it he'd rather eat rice and Spaghetti-Os than benefit from the extra income"), Mikey doesn't have to TA a single class until the second semester of the second year of his PhD in theoretical mathematics. He has a pretty good scholarship and he's pretty good at scrimping (except for when he's not--he really needs to stop swinging by Ray and Bob's used CD shop every Wednesday night on the way home from school) and he's really good at deleting emails/changing the subject/running away every time someone mentions that there's a class still looking for TAs. The few times he's needed the extra cash, he's asked around to see who needs a research assistant to do some number-crunching or whatever, and all told, he's done a really good job of getting by.
But then one day his supervisor notices that Mikey has yet to TA a single class ever, and he really ought to get on that if he wants to land an instructor position before he graduates, which he really ought to get if he ever hopes to land a real job after he graduates. If he graduates.
Mikey blinks behind his glasses and nods at his supervisor, just barely restraining himself from heaving a deep and suffering sigh. He does a lot of blinking and nodding while sitting in the chair in front of his supervisor's desk. He also does a lot of other things he'd really rather not at his supervisor's request, generally agreed to while sitting in this very chair.
He finds the letter with the details of his TAship for the next term in his mailbox in the department two weeks before Christmas. By a different, nastier, twist of fate, he ends up with one of the ten sections for first-year calculus for non-majors. Merry fucking Christmas indeed, Mikey thinks sourly.
* * *
"They're letting you teach freshmen?" Gerard cackles when Mikey gets him on the phone that night.
"They're making me," Mikey grumbles defensively, scowling in Gerard's general direction. "I didn't have a choice about doing it, I didn't have a choice about which class it was, and I sure as fuck didn't get a choice about the time slot, either."
Mikey's tutorial is 8 a.m. on Friday morning. No, seriously. Mikey wonders what he did in a past life to deserve this.
"Maybe it won't be as bad as--" Gerard starts to offer, but is cut off by a loud crash and the sound of breaking glass.
"The fuck, Gee?" Mikey is still annoyed but leaning towards concerned (though his concern is tempered by the fact that random crashes are sometimes the norm while talking to his brother).
A minute passes without Gerard saying anything, and Mikey can hear him banging around somewhere across the room, swearing steadily all the while.
"Mikey?" Frank's voice comes through the line. "Can he call you back? He's, uh, yeah, he's definitely bleeding on a canvas that isn't actually supposed to have blood on it."
"Yeah," Mikey sighs. This isn't quite what he'd imagined happening when he called Gerard for moral support, but at this point he'll take what he can get, even if it does involve his favourite (and only) brother coming to some kind of bodily harm.
* * *
So, word gets around about Mikey's impending doom.
Frank is the first to say anything, probably because he heard it right from Gerard once the bleeding stopped. It's the next day, when the three of them are standing huddled on the front steps of the building where Gerard rents a studio, smoking and trying not to die of cold, when Frank opens his big mouth.
"You'll be fine, Mikey! You're, like, some kind of genius at math, right?"
"I guess," Mikey says. He kind of wants to punch Frank right in his earnest little face, but he doesn't because it'd piss Gerard off. "But that's the problem. Numbers just make sense to me, I have no idea how to actually explain things to people who don't get it."
"Oh. Well."
"Yeah," Mikey says. "Oh well."
Ray and Bob are next. Bob grins evilly when Mikey steps into their shop on Wednesday to dig through the pile of new arrivals. "Oh Mikey," he sing-songs, "Can you teach Ray how to count to ten? I think he's forgotten."
"I'll teach you how to count to one," Mikey tosses back, flipping Bob off.
"I hate you," Ray's voice drifts in from the back room. "A guy punches one thing into the calculator wrong, and--"
"Excuses, excuses," Bob cuts him off, and then flashes a real smile at Mikey. "Freshman calc for non-majors, I hear?"
Mikey nods.
"Damn. Who'd you manage to piss off to get stuck with that?"
"My supervisor thinks it'll be good for me."
Bob makes a sympathetic noise.
"I'm so dead," Mikey says, and buries his face in his hands.
"But that shit pays well, doesn't it?" Ray has emerged from the back room at some point to join them at the counter.
"Yes," Mikey snits. "So you guys can use my first paycheque to throw me an awesome funeral."
Gerard is quietly sympathetic over Christmas break, occasionally leaving Mikey post-it notes with doodles of Mikey in a tweed blazer with leather elbow patches standing in front of a chalkboard covered in incomprehensible equations (Mikey is pretty sure that half of them came from Wikipedia and the other half are just meaningless doodles), or Mikey dressed as a superhero with "TA" emblazoned across his chest and little math symbols floating in the air around his head, or--and this one is Mikey's favourite--a bunch of freshman-shaped demons attacking Mikey with fangs and claws and fiery breath while Mikey fends them off with a textbook shield and a yardstick sword. Lurking in the corner of the yellow square is a shadowy figure labeled "Dr Evil" with a jagged arrow. Mikey's been calling his supervisor Dr Evil since early the previous year, and he's not sure that Gerard actually knows the guy's real name.
So Mikey goes through a Christmas like any other, gets wasted on New Year's like he always does, and wakes up on New Year's Day with a brand new knot in the pit of his stomach completely unrelated to everything he doesn't remember drinking the night before.
Spring term starts in three days.
* * *
The first day back after break, Mikey finds himself sitting in the departmental seminar room at approximately Godforsaken O'clock in the morning for mandatory TA training. Some dude who apparently gives this talk a hundred times a year is enthusiastically setting up a powerpoint, but all Mikey can really focus on is his coffee sitting on the desk in front of him.
Mikey finishes the coffee way too fast and is left with nothing to give his attention to but the presentation. The presentation actually ends up being kind of useful--or it would be if any of it sticks, which Mikey really doubts, given the hour and his current sub-optimal level of caffeination.
By two-thirty that afternoon, Mikey's forgotten most of what he "learned" that morning, including the website he was told to check out if he wanted a refresher on any of the material. Mikey gives a mental shrug and figures he can probably just wing it.
* * *
Just like every other Thursday night since he's been in school, Mikey goes out to his favourite local dive bar to catch their new-and/or-local music night.
Just like every other Thursday night since he's been going to these showcases, Mikey gets kind of drunk, for values of "kind of" that equal "really a lot".
(He will later have vague recollections of at least two rounds of tequila shots with Gabe and Pete "to wish our dear Mikeyway luck as he impersonates a responsible human being tomorrow".
He's pretty sure all the bands sucked, but that's also pretty much the way it always goes.
He will also vaguely remember dancing sandwiched between Gabe and Pete, and when he does he'll jerk to look down at the knees of his jeans, which are the same ones he passed out wearing last night and hasn't changed since, to make sure they aren't crusted with bathroom floor filth from a blowjob he isn't sure he didn't give.
It's also possible the only reason he got home at all was that Pete poured him into a cab and then jumped in with him, walking Mikey all the way into his bedroom and tucking him in with a kiss to the forehead and a whisper of "good luck" in his ear. But that might have been a dream.)
Unlike every other Friday morning, Mikey actually wakes up before noon. He jerks awake suddenly with a throbbing headache and a delicate stomach, and moans as he rolls over to look at his alarm clock, which has apparently been beeping for the last God-knows-how long.
It's 7:20. It's really, really, inhumanly early; the sun isn't even up.
Mikey leaps out of bed and runs for the bathroom, figuring that he'll decide if he needs to puke (for whatever reason) when he gets there.
He needs to. For a couple reasons.
Mikey glares at himself in the mirror after he finishes brushing his teeth, trying to decide if he has time to straighten his hair or not. He doesn't, and just barely remembers to grab a hat on his way out the door.
* * *
Mikey is late to his first ever tutorial, because he completely forgot to stake out where the room was in advance, and who knew the building the room was in would have such labyrinthine hallways hiding the room from him, anyway? Oh god, he is so hung over.
When he finally finds his classroom, it's six minutes past the hour.
The classroom has a grand total of eight students in it. Mikey's pretty sure the attendance list he glanced at a few weeks ago had upwards of fifty names on it.
He slinks up to the front of the room as stealthily as he can, and dumps his bag and coat on the desk. He turns to the board, only to discover that there's no chalk on the little ledge.
"Uhh," Mikey says, his voice raspy and cracking on the first words he's said aloud so far today. "Anyone know where the chalk is?"
Nobody knows where the chalk is.
"Okay," Mikey says. He looks down at the desk in front of him and wonders if he's allowed to go through the drawers. He figures he may as well. "So, uh, I hope you're all here for MATH, uh, 122? No, that was last term, right? What is it this term?"
"One twenty-three," one of the two students sitting in the front row supplies.
"Right," Mikey says. "I knew that." There is a half-muffled snigger from the back of the room. Mikey ignores it and opens the top-most drawer. It's empty. So is the one under it. The bottom drawer holds a pad of graph paper and a rusty Bunsen burner with no rubber hose. Mikey is about to give up his search when he notices a shallow little drawer in the middle of the desk. He yanks it open so hard it almost falls out, but he is rewarded with the half-dozen tiny pieces of chalk that were hiding inside.
He grabs a tiny stub and turns to the board to write:
MATH 122 TUTORIAL, SECTION 10
T.A.: MICHAEL WAY
(Mikey figures he might be more of an authority figure if he goes by his full name, rather than the nickname Gerard gave him when he was five and Mikey was two that's managed to stick for the last twenty-one years. It just looks and sounds strange to him, though. He wonders if it would look really bad if he goes and erases it and just asks the kids to call him Mikey.)
"Okay," Mikey says. "Any questions?"
"Should we hand in our homework now?" It's the other keener in the front row.
Mikey didn't even know he was supposed to be collecting homework. "Sure," he says. "That's probably a really good idea."
Six students' homework end up on the desk in front of him. Mikey isn't sure why the last two students bothered to show up if they didn't have homework to hand in, but whatever, like he was going to complain about less grading. Oh god, grading.
"Okay," Mikey says. "So, uh. You guys all know what an integral is?"
He is met with a wall of resounding silence.
"Well," Mikey starts. "Well, did you guys at least go to the lecture?"
Some of them, at least, had gone to the lecture.
Mikey decides to go for the long shot: "Has anyone even looked at the readings?"
Of course not.
Winging it maybe isn't working so well, Mikey realizes, trying not to panic.
Halfway through the hour, Mikey is flushed hot with general embarrassment, and he reaches up without thinking to take his beanie off. But as he's pulling it off he can feel his hair getting completely messed up, so he jams it back on the instant he's got it all the way off.
He pointedly ignores the continued snickering coming from the back of the room. Maybe next week he'll try to work on this "establishing respect" thing he vaguely remembered from training.
Mikey almost dies of happiness when a student actually puts up her hand to ask a question. "So, like, maybe this is a stupid question," she starts, and Mikey nods encouragingly because he'd rather not say anything aloud--he would feel bad lying, and he knows for a fact there is such a thing as a stupid question. "Anyway, I was wondering if you could explain antiderivatives? Are they, like, the opposite of a derivative? I have no idea how you're supposed to figure it out!"
A few of the other students nod in agreement.
Mikey wants to beat his head into the nearest brick wall. That right there was an unequivocally stupid question. "Well," he says, and then chews on his lip as he tries to figure out where to start. He decides to just start talking. "If you have a function, f, and you take its antiderivative, then the derivative of the antiderivative is f! It's like working backwards, right..."
When he finishes explaining, he glances at his watch and is surprised to see that ten minutes have passed. Then he looks up at his students. Two are asleep in the back row, and the rest of them look horribly confused. Mikey has no idea why anyone would be confused; integrals are so easy, okay, seriously. He frowns a little bit and decides it's time to take up the practice problems assigned for the week.
At the end of the tutorial, Mikey leaves the classroom completely unaware of the half-formed chalky handprints up and down his jeans, not to mention the broad line of chalk across his ass from where he was leaning against the little ledge at the bottom of the chalkboard. His heart is pounding hard, his lower back is weirdly sweaty, and he's pretty sure he couldn't tell you anything that just happened in the last sixty minutes, even if he got subpoenaed and had to swear on a bible. He could only find a way of explaining the answers to half of the questions the students had asked, he has no idea when their next test is, or what chapter they're supposed to read for next week, and he isn't completely sure he had given them the right answer to one of the questions they'd taken up.
On the upside, he only has to do this nine more times. He figures he might make it okay, after all.
(Or, Mikey Way is the Worst TA Ever)
Mikey/his ineptitude, plus gratuitous background Ray/Bob, Frank/Gerard, Mikey/Pete/Gabe; AU; PG-13
2700 words.
Summary: Mikey finds the letter with the details of his TAship for the next term in his mailbox in the department two weeks before Christmas. By a different, nastier, twist of fate, he ends up with one of the ten sections for first-year calculus for non-majors.
Notes: sociofemme and ubixtiz were useful to the writing of this story! I am going to fail my seminar if I don't stop writing fic instead of term paper! I swear that this doesn't all come from personal experience.
ETA As of May 31, this story now has a sequel! Took My Heart and Crossed It is 21,000 words, R-rated, and I think you should read it! [/shameless plug]
By some twist of fate (if by "twist of fate" you mean "he's so desperate to avoid it he'd rather eat rice and Spaghetti-Os than benefit from the extra income"), Mikey doesn't have to TA a single class until the second semester of the second year of his PhD in theoretical mathematics. He has a pretty good scholarship and he's pretty good at scrimping (except for when he's not--he really needs to stop swinging by Ray and Bob's used CD shop every Wednesday night on the way home from school) and he's really good at deleting emails/changing the subject/running away every time someone mentions that there's a class still looking for TAs. The few times he's needed the extra cash, he's asked around to see who needs a research assistant to do some number-crunching or whatever, and all told, he's done a really good job of getting by.
But then one day his supervisor notices that Mikey has yet to TA a single class ever, and he really ought to get on that if he wants to land an instructor position before he graduates, which he really ought to get if he ever hopes to land a real job after he graduates. If he graduates.
Mikey blinks behind his glasses and nods at his supervisor, just barely restraining himself from heaving a deep and suffering sigh. He does a lot of blinking and nodding while sitting in the chair in front of his supervisor's desk. He also does a lot of other things he'd really rather not at his supervisor's request, generally agreed to while sitting in this very chair.
He finds the letter with the details of his TAship for the next term in his mailbox in the department two weeks before Christmas. By a different, nastier, twist of fate, he ends up with one of the ten sections for first-year calculus for non-majors. Merry fucking Christmas indeed, Mikey thinks sourly.
* * *
"They're letting you teach freshmen?" Gerard cackles when Mikey gets him on the phone that night.
"They're making me," Mikey grumbles defensively, scowling in Gerard's general direction. "I didn't have a choice about doing it, I didn't have a choice about which class it was, and I sure as fuck didn't get a choice about the time slot, either."
Mikey's tutorial is 8 a.m. on Friday morning. No, seriously. Mikey wonders what he did in a past life to deserve this.
"Maybe it won't be as bad as--" Gerard starts to offer, but is cut off by a loud crash and the sound of breaking glass.
"The fuck, Gee?" Mikey is still annoyed but leaning towards concerned (though his concern is tempered by the fact that random crashes are sometimes the norm while talking to his brother).
A minute passes without Gerard saying anything, and Mikey can hear him banging around somewhere across the room, swearing steadily all the while.
"Mikey?" Frank's voice comes through the line. "Can he call you back? He's, uh, yeah, he's definitely bleeding on a canvas that isn't actually supposed to have blood on it."
"Yeah," Mikey sighs. This isn't quite what he'd imagined happening when he called Gerard for moral support, but at this point he'll take what he can get, even if it does involve his favourite (and only) brother coming to some kind of bodily harm.
* * *
So, word gets around about Mikey's impending doom.
Frank is the first to say anything, probably because he heard it right from Gerard once the bleeding stopped. It's the next day, when the three of them are standing huddled on the front steps of the building where Gerard rents a studio, smoking and trying not to die of cold, when Frank opens his big mouth.
"You'll be fine, Mikey! You're, like, some kind of genius at math, right?"
"I guess," Mikey says. He kind of wants to punch Frank right in his earnest little face, but he doesn't because it'd piss Gerard off. "But that's the problem. Numbers just make sense to me, I have no idea how to actually explain things to people who don't get it."
"Oh. Well."
"Yeah," Mikey says. "Oh well."
Ray and Bob are next. Bob grins evilly when Mikey steps into their shop on Wednesday to dig through the pile of new arrivals. "Oh Mikey," he sing-songs, "Can you teach Ray how to count to ten? I think he's forgotten."
"I'll teach you how to count to one," Mikey tosses back, flipping Bob off.
"I hate you," Ray's voice drifts in from the back room. "A guy punches one thing into the calculator wrong, and--"
"Excuses, excuses," Bob cuts him off, and then flashes a real smile at Mikey. "Freshman calc for non-majors, I hear?"
Mikey nods.
"Damn. Who'd you manage to piss off to get stuck with that?"
"My supervisor thinks it'll be good for me."
Bob makes a sympathetic noise.
"I'm so dead," Mikey says, and buries his face in his hands.
"But that shit pays well, doesn't it?" Ray has emerged from the back room at some point to join them at the counter.
"Yes," Mikey snits. "So you guys can use my first paycheque to throw me an awesome funeral."
Gerard is quietly sympathetic over Christmas break, occasionally leaving Mikey post-it notes with doodles of Mikey in a tweed blazer with leather elbow patches standing in front of a chalkboard covered in incomprehensible equations (Mikey is pretty sure that half of them came from Wikipedia and the other half are just meaningless doodles), or Mikey dressed as a superhero with "TA" emblazoned across his chest and little math symbols floating in the air around his head, or--and this one is Mikey's favourite--a bunch of freshman-shaped demons attacking Mikey with fangs and claws and fiery breath while Mikey fends them off with a textbook shield and a yardstick sword. Lurking in the corner of the yellow square is a shadowy figure labeled "Dr Evil" with a jagged arrow. Mikey's been calling his supervisor Dr Evil since early the previous year, and he's not sure that Gerard actually knows the guy's real name.
So Mikey goes through a Christmas like any other, gets wasted on New Year's like he always does, and wakes up on New Year's Day with a brand new knot in the pit of his stomach completely unrelated to everything he doesn't remember drinking the night before.
Spring term starts in three days.
* * *
The first day back after break, Mikey finds himself sitting in the departmental seminar room at approximately Godforsaken O'clock in the morning for mandatory TA training. Some dude who apparently gives this talk a hundred times a year is enthusiastically setting up a powerpoint, but all Mikey can really focus on is his coffee sitting on the desk in front of him.
Mikey finishes the coffee way too fast and is left with nothing to give his attention to but the presentation. The presentation actually ends up being kind of useful--or it would be if any of it sticks, which Mikey really doubts, given the hour and his current sub-optimal level of caffeination.
By two-thirty that afternoon, Mikey's forgotten most of what he "learned" that morning, including the website he was told to check out if he wanted a refresher on any of the material. Mikey gives a mental shrug and figures he can probably just wing it.
* * *
Just like every other Thursday night since he's been in school, Mikey goes out to his favourite local dive bar to catch their new-and/or-local music night.
Just like every other Thursday night since he's been going to these showcases, Mikey gets kind of drunk, for values of "kind of" that equal "really a lot".
(He will later have vague recollections of at least two rounds of tequila shots with Gabe and Pete "to wish our dear Mikeyway luck as he impersonates a responsible human being tomorrow".
He's pretty sure all the bands sucked, but that's also pretty much the way it always goes.
He will also vaguely remember dancing sandwiched between Gabe and Pete, and when he does he'll jerk to look down at the knees of his jeans, which are the same ones he passed out wearing last night and hasn't changed since, to make sure they aren't crusted with bathroom floor filth from a blowjob he isn't sure he didn't give.
It's also possible the only reason he got home at all was that Pete poured him into a cab and then jumped in with him, walking Mikey all the way into his bedroom and tucking him in with a kiss to the forehead and a whisper of "good luck" in his ear. But that might have been a dream.)
Unlike every other Friday morning, Mikey actually wakes up before noon. He jerks awake suddenly with a throbbing headache and a delicate stomach, and moans as he rolls over to look at his alarm clock, which has apparently been beeping for the last God-knows-how long.
It's 7:20. It's really, really, inhumanly early; the sun isn't even up.
Mikey leaps out of bed and runs for the bathroom, figuring that he'll decide if he needs to puke (for whatever reason) when he gets there.
He needs to. For a couple reasons.
Mikey glares at himself in the mirror after he finishes brushing his teeth, trying to decide if he has time to straighten his hair or not. He doesn't, and just barely remembers to grab a hat on his way out the door.
* * *
Mikey is late to his first ever tutorial, because he completely forgot to stake out where the room was in advance, and who knew the building the room was in would have such labyrinthine hallways hiding the room from him, anyway? Oh god, he is so hung over.
When he finally finds his classroom, it's six minutes past the hour.
The classroom has a grand total of eight students in it. Mikey's pretty sure the attendance list he glanced at a few weeks ago had upwards of fifty names on it.
He slinks up to the front of the room as stealthily as he can, and dumps his bag and coat on the desk. He turns to the board, only to discover that there's no chalk on the little ledge.
"Uhh," Mikey says, his voice raspy and cracking on the first words he's said aloud so far today. "Anyone know where the chalk is?"
Nobody knows where the chalk is.
"Okay," Mikey says. He looks down at the desk in front of him and wonders if he's allowed to go through the drawers. He figures he may as well. "So, uh, I hope you're all here for MATH, uh, 122? No, that was last term, right? What is it this term?"
"One twenty-three," one of the two students sitting in the front row supplies.
"Right," Mikey says. "I knew that." There is a half-muffled snigger from the back of the room. Mikey ignores it and opens the top-most drawer. It's empty. So is the one under it. The bottom drawer holds a pad of graph paper and a rusty Bunsen burner with no rubber hose. Mikey is about to give up his search when he notices a shallow little drawer in the middle of the desk. He yanks it open so hard it almost falls out, but he is rewarded with the half-dozen tiny pieces of chalk that were hiding inside.
He grabs a tiny stub and turns to the board to write:
MATH 122 TUTORIAL, SECTION 10
T.A.: MICHAEL WAY
(Mikey figures he might be more of an authority figure if he goes by his full name, rather than the nickname Gerard gave him when he was five and Mikey was two that's managed to stick for the last twenty-one years. It just looks and sounds strange to him, though. He wonders if it would look really bad if he goes and erases it and just asks the kids to call him Mikey.)
"Okay," Mikey says. "Any questions?"
"Should we hand in our homework now?" It's the other keener in the front row.
Mikey didn't even know he was supposed to be collecting homework. "Sure," he says. "That's probably a really good idea."
Six students' homework end up on the desk in front of him. Mikey isn't sure why the last two students bothered to show up if they didn't have homework to hand in, but whatever, like he was going to complain about less grading. Oh god, grading.
"Okay," Mikey says. "So, uh. You guys all know what an integral is?"
He is met with a wall of resounding silence.
"Well," Mikey starts. "Well, did you guys at least go to the lecture?"
Some of them, at least, had gone to the lecture.
Mikey decides to go for the long shot: "Has anyone even looked at the readings?"
Of course not.
Winging it maybe isn't working so well, Mikey realizes, trying not to panic.
Halfway through the hour, Mikey is flushed hot with general embarrassment, and he reaches up without thinking to take his beanie off. But as he's pulling it off he can feel his hair getting completely messed up, so he jams it back on the instant he's got it all the way off.
He pointedly ignores the continued snickering coming from the back of the room. Maybe next week he'll try to work on this "establishing respect" thing he vaguely remembered from training.
Mikey almost dies of happiness when a student actually puts up her hand to ask a question. "So, like, maybe this is a stupid question," she starts, and Mikey nods encouragingly because he'd rather not say anything aloud--he would feel bad lying, and he knows for a fact there is such a thing as a stupid question. "Anyway, I was wondering if you could explain antiderivatives? Are they, like, the opposite of a derivative? I have no idea how you're supposed to figure it out!"
A few of the other students nod in agreement.
Mikey wants to beat his head into the nearest brick wall. That right there was an unequivocally stupid question. "Well," he says, and then chews on his lip as he tries to figure out where to start. He decides to just start talking. "If you have a function, f, and you take its antiderivative, then the derivative of the antiderivative is f! It's like working backwards, right..."
When he finishes explaining, he glances at his watch and is surprised to see that ten minutes have passed. Then he looks up at his students. Two are asleep in the back row, and the rest of them look horribly confused. Mikey has no idea why anyone would be confused; integrals are so easy, okay, seriously. He frowns a little bit and decides it's time to take up the practice problems assigned for the week.
At the end of the tutorial, Mikey leaves the classroom completely unaware of the half-formed chalky handprints up and down his jeans, not to mention the broad line of chalk across his ass from where he was leaning against the little ledge at the bottom of the chalkboard. His heart is pounding hard, his lower back is weirdly sweaty, and he's pretty sure he couldn't tell you anything that just happened in the last sixty minutes, even if he got subpoenaed and had to swear on a bible. He could only find a way of explaining the answers to half of the questions the students had asked, he has no idea when their next test is, or what chapter they're supposed to read for next week, and he isn't completely sure he had given them the right answer to one of the questions they'd taken up.
On the upside, he only has to do this nine more times. He figures he might make it okay, after all.