That's an unusual way of framing that information. She's not one to interrupt a fellow educator though, she might ask about it in private but not in front of the kids.

Eventually, the teacher turns to Crystal.

"I haven't seen you before! Are you here to enjoy the pretty flowers and ponds, too? Or even try diving to find some of the sunken treasures?"

"I don't actually know where I am or how I got here and my phone doesn't have service. I'm having a rather alarming day." Through this all she keeps her voice carefully steady.

"What happened? Do you think you have amnesia? Can I see your phone?" The teacher doesn't hide her shock particularly well, but tries to act as reassuring as possible for Crystal.

"I don't think I have amnesia... I was walking through some woods and then suddenly I was here. And these flowers and school uniforms are both unfamiliar. Here's my phone." She takes out her Pixel 6.

The teacher looks at her phone. It doesn't take her many seconds to realize it's not of thomassian make; somehow, a genuine teleporter from another dimension is in front of her. She rapidly dials a number. "Hi, Pandemic Awareness Day came early this year. Tell everyone from Heaviside Arboreal Boarding School that a person has teleported from another dimension, potentially bringing an infectious illness. This is urgent information."

"Excuse me, but what's your name? My name is Clarissa. You must feel so disoriented, but don't worry; we're here for you." She subtly gestures for the children to keep their distance from the woman sitting on the bench.

"Oh. This isn't just another city. This is, oh. I'm Crystal, Crystal Miller. And I'm not getting home soon am I?"

"I wouldn't know that, you shouldn't ask me! But don't worry; we'll be here for you. We'll have a room ready for you by the time we get to the school, trust me."

She motions for Crystal to follow her, as she slowly begins the walk back through the spacious canopy of trees, brightly lit by the sun.

Oh right they mentioned diseases... She will take the N95 mask in her pocket out and put it on. Maybe that will be important. She gets up and follows the teacher.

After 20 or so minutes, they reach a school building that seems to be maybe 8 or 9 stories tall? At least weirdly tall for a school building. Clarissa looks at her phone, before leading Crystal into one of the dorms on the ground floor. It's a reasonably spacious room, with a thick, soft carpet and a small bathroom. It still has 2 upper bunks, above the soft carpet.

"This is where you should probably stay for the quarantine period. We're hoping to convert a nearby room to a medical facility fairly soon; don't worry about a thing."

"Okay. I can do that. Do you know what's going to happen next?"

"Well, we'll send out a swab in case you actually have a virus that's dangerous for us but not you, so we can get a head-start on developing a medicine. And I'll have to stay with you at this point, too. I worry that we'll have to go through the full 10-day quarantine, unfortunately."

"I don't think they could do that in my world. Is it really a good idea for us to be staying together we basically spent half an hour outside together I wouldn't expect you to catch anything from that or vice versa but ten days in close quarters seems like it would effectively guarantee we would get sick if it was going to happen." She pauses. "Unless that's the point."

"Well, yeah... I'm kind of expected to be the one taking one for the team, here. For all we know, I'm sick already. So why risk someone else? Anyway, you sound distressed... I can change into some real PPE and give you a hug, if that makes it better?"

"Uh... you're also risking me and I didn't get asked about that. I don't know why you're being so blase about this but I definitely didn't sign up to get some weird disease that you already have vaccines for."

"Sorry, sorry! I can happily let you quarantine by yourself. It's just... well, I think we'd both probably have to find out, eventually."

She takes a deep breath and steadies herself. "I would really prefer that. I'm okay with being quarantined for longer if that means I get vaccines or whatever else that makes me less likely to die of something that could have been prevented. Assuming, your vaccines are even safe for me to take. I don't know how we're speaking the same language or why we look so similar."

"Well, I guess we can get you vaccines? We just haven't needed them for a while, just because we did such a good job of stamping anything that might need them out. All the vaccines we have are kept in storage, just in case they prove useful. I'm hoping they'd be safe for you, just because we look so similar and even speak the same language. But the separate quarantine thing... yes, I'll 100% walk off and leave you by yourself. To... keep you safe as well."

"Thank you."

Crystal Miller receives a phone. This one does have signal. It's made of some kind of ultra-light plastic, and a few seconds of tapping starts activating the projector, letting her get a big screen view of everything happening the wall opposite the door into the dorm. Thomassia has sappy, slightly cliche romance movies; these are about a couple first meeting and growing ever more intensely in love, before returning to the place they first met and reminiscing on everything that happened.

By the time she's done with the quarantine, the thomassians, adults and children both, are excited and curious to learn from this mysterious human who teleported to their school. The kids were excited to have their first class with her, with her wearing a lightweight and transparent face-mask made from a transparent film that left a faint bluish sheen over her nose and mouth.

Crystal is very glad she has not gotten terribly sick and somewhat worried that might change. The first big thing she wants before teaching a class is to watch one. Ideally without distracting the kids too much.

She also turns her mind to what she should teach. The basics are probably out, math science and vocabulary are all things where it's pretty likely their teachers are pretty out of sync and pre-requisite knowledge is usually pretty important. Well, maybe not necessarily. She could split them into groups and try to have them work on a puzzle of some kind. It's just hard to gauge difficulty level there. Literature could also work she has some short stories on her original phone and maybe reading and discussing one together could be good. The last option is history... history has always been a hard subject to teach finding the balance between being honest about the many mistakes of the past without making it sound like everyone in the past was just an awful person is hard. She usually ends up erring on the side of making things sound better than they were.

She explains all of this to the local teachers and asks for their thoughts.

Clarissa nods at Crystal's suggestion to watch a class before teaching one herself. She finds a recording of a class and projects it onto the wall of Crystal's room, showing another teacher in the middle of a science class. It's a class explaining energy and how it can come in many forms: energy in a battery, moving a car forward, in an exploding a stick of dynamite, and spinning turbines in nuclear reactors.

The teacher in the recording repeatedly underlines how the phenomena are connected, and fundamentally commensurable, by explaining how each of these examples of some amount of energy, can be measured by comparing it to another example. How an EV battery has as much energy as you spend on 400 miles of driving, how many miles of driving needs as much energy as is found in one stick of dynamite, how many sticks of dynamite are needed to release as much energy as a nuclear power plant makes in a day, and how a nuclear power running for a day can fully charge all these EV batteries.

The heart of the idea is seeing connections, unity, and context: seeing how energy can come in many different forms, and be measured in many different ways, but ultimately only be one concept.

Alright, have the kids in question been taught about the scientific method and about how to test out ideas?

The kids have in fact gone beyond that. They not only learn about the scientific method, but they even learn about the design of experiments and how information theory and multi-armed bandits can be used during assignment in adaptive trials, so you don't need as much time or resources to perform the experiment and learn whatever you wanted to learn!

Oh... she hasn't ever heard of multi-armed bantits. So Petals Around the Rose would be too basic for a lesson then? Where are they with math do they know algebra and exponents?