Last month, Sam crossed a trickle of a stream in the woods and found himself in a place that he could only describe as another world. The colors seemed to stand out stronger there, and the light was so bright that it almost hurt to look beyond the shadows of the trees. He wanted to go back to this magical forest, his secret place, but instead he sat at his desk, chin on his hand, bored in school. The fifth grade had nothing to teach him. He already read books on his own, and he could multiply well enough to get by in math. Under his elbow sat his math textbook open to page 57. The class was somewhere on page 32, but, since Sam possessed an uncanny ability to focus on tasks, he went on ahead whenever he finished a set of problems. The class seemed to move in predictable circles. Whenever his teacher, Ms. Bucket, began to even hint at talking about something new or interesting, a troublemaker across the room would swear or shout and then Ms. Bucket would start shushing and disciplining and nothing would get done. Both Ms. Bucket and the students left that classroom every afternoon feeling exasperated and worn out, and neither learned much of anything.
Soon, Ms. Bucket would see that Sam had completed more than enough extra pages of worksheets for one afternoon and give him permission him to grab a laptop from the cart. This was Sam’s favorite part of every class because he was left mostly free to explore the internet as he pleased. He was supposed to use the laptop to log into IXL and complete even more math problems online, but he preferred to look stuff up in the search bar. He loved to look up cute pictures of baby animals, or pictures of games he wanted to play but couldn’t. Sometimes he looked up creepy things like organs or giant wasps or monsters and freaked himself out. He wished he could just stay home and play on the computer there rather than come all the way to school to do it.
Ms. Bucket did soon notice that Sam was bored, and she went up to his desk with an apologetic curve of her eyebrows and a smile. “Wow, you did all that?”
Sam looked at his hands and nodded. “Yes, it wasn’t very hard.”
“Awesome work as always, Sam. You can go grab a Chromebook.”
Sam did as he was asked, and soon he was surfing the web while the jeering class moved on around him. He thought that today he would do some research on his magical place in the woods, so looked up the word the keyword “forest.” He was met with a sprawling page of boxes, each containing a picture of a lush, green forest. Some of them were bright orange, images of the woods during Fall when the leaves change into beautiful warm colors and die off the branches. Some of the pictures were of jungles, the wet and misty rain forests. Only one picture reminded him of his magical forest. It showed a tree so bright that its cracked, brown bark looked orange, and massive dragon scales of bark flowed down the trunk of the tree like lava. Sam read the caption to himself:
“Redwood Forests of California.”