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Interestingly, real life history somewhat justifies the teacher.Based off the explanation, they must have though. They made the outer square, subtract the 4 triangles to get the area of the inner square, and got the side based off the area of the inner square. They are quite literally, finding the root of a square from the area.
At the time when Pythagora was alive, numbers were believed to be whole and nothing else; finding the concept of a square root and especially the root of 2 which is neither a whole number nor representable through the division of whole numbers, shook the very core of the mathematics known at the time and some people even kept this knowledge secret to avoid repercussions in other areas of their society.
With some handwaving we can pretend something similar happened in the world this comic is set in, so while the operation of obtaining the square root is known, the implications behind it are not.