by Mirela Avdibegović, Sarajevo

Another wonderful day. Every day, I look forward to the math classes. We're never sure, how far in the past, will our teacher, take us this time. How does it work and if it's just my fiction I'm not quite sure but, as soon as other teacher knock on the door, things suddenly come back to their place as if nothing had happened.

Today she again mentioned the Egyptians and the origins of the word geometry. I knew exactly that we would be taken now to the middle of the pyramid built some 5000 years ago. And yes, it happened ...

My companions and I are walking by the beach, led by a wise Egyptian priest. He  explains why are the rods, that we were passing by, stuck and that they are tagging the border when the Nil River flooded.

- You see, childrens, I want you to measure (metrics) the earth (geo).

We all loked around. Like thousands of times so far, we do not know how this has been achieved. Where did those benches and our papers disappear. We are looking at a priest who looks like our teacher a bit, but only a little bit - is it her? While smiling, she share the ropes, and give us a task to connect certain rods themselves and then compare the lengths. We are ready to go to work because we know that after this heat, after the job is done, there is a reward - a glas of water and rest in the shade.

- So, kids, did we measure the length so we could make comparisons?

- And how do we measure the length? We do not have any material.

- We need a Pharaoh's elbow or foot, so as not to interfere with the ruler, we will consider that your two feet are Pharaoh's length and we will measure the length of the rope.

We approach the measurement and conclude that it is in this way more interesting and comparable in length. From a hidden pocket he puts the meter - the only sign that we are still from the future. We repeat the measurement. Time passes quickly and we haven't written anything in our notebooks. As soon as I thought about it, we went back to the classroom, and there was a task written in our notebooks. My friends and I turned around. When asked what we use to measure, we answer loudly in one voice: meter, elbows, feet. The teacher laughs. We conclude that we use a meter.

- Did we learn anything more? What does the word geometry mean?

To this question we all knew the answer: measuring the earth!

- Yes, that's right, but when we do geometry, we actually study the relationships between geometric bodies. You ware comparing the length of the rope, whose length was larger and thus compared the geometric shape of the plot.

It is ringing .... why do fun classes last so short.  See you tomorrow .. she said. Yes, I can hardly wait.