Crystal lives a fairly ordinary if hectic life as a fifth grade teacher at Jefferson elementary school. The kids are as well behaved as kids ever are and her colleagues are nice. She is very much not expecting anything of the sort when she steps between two trees on a weekend walk and abruptly finds herself somewhere clearly different.
"Alright, for the rest of the time you can either do your normal work or form small groups and take turns making up your own rules and seeing if the other people can figure them out."
They spend the time inventing their own rules, or just using their phones to take cloze tests and going over flashcards, very intently. The children display a very intense level of concentration. One of them is very slowly pacing the classroom, trying to understand some particularly tough concept and explain it to themselves.
"Should one of us see if they need help?" she whispers to Clarissa regarding the pacing child.
"They know to ask for help! It's one thing that really gets drilled into them." Eventually, someone walks up to Clarissa. "Could you explain the parts of the entropy formula, again?"
"Well, the first part, the innermost part, is how many 1s and 0s you'll need. Then of course you have to multiply that by the chance that you get that symbol. You do this for all your possible symbols. But of course, the innermost part is always negative, and you want a positive value. So you negate it again.
And you want the biggest number, right? And the way you do that is that you try making a square: basically, you want the 2 inner parts to both be the same, because going from 5*3 to 4*4 is bigger than vice versa, it's a bigger percentage increase for the smaller one of the two."