He didn't just copy. He studied how the solution moved from one step to the next. He realized he had been forgetting to change the sign when multiplying by a negative. "Oh! That's it!"

The next morning, the teacher, Irina Petrovna, handed out the yellowed paper slips. Maksim didn't feel the usual panic. He saw the monomials, remembered the "map" he'd studied the night before, and his pen moved with confidence. When the grades were posted on the Electronic Diary , a bright red "5" sat next to his name.

The site loaded with the familiar blue-and-white interface. He navigated to "7 Klass" and found the Ershova section. There it was: the exact solution to the problem that had been haunting him for twenty minutes. But as he looked at the neat steps on the screen, something clicked. Seeing the way the variables shifted and the exponents added up wasn't just a way to "cheat"—it was like a map.

Spishu.ru had been his secret coach, but the victory—that was all his.

Tomorrow was the big independent work day—"Self-test C-14" on multiplication of monomials. Maksim opened his bag and pulled out the worn Ershova collection. The problems stared back, a sea of exponents and brackets. He felt that familiar sinking feeling.

The clock on the classroom wall ticked like a countdown. For Maksim, a 7th grader at School No. 12, the sight of the workbook by A.P. Ershova and V.V. Goloborodko usually meant one thing: a long evening of battling polynomials.