Sub. Professor Joseph Regal
July 03, 2012 7:11 PM
Beginners class [1 and 2 years] by Sub. Professor Joseph Regal
Joseph Regal had followed his father’s path into academic life, and for the last few years he had been focusing on charms research. He liked the research branch of academia, but he sometimes took teaching jobs to help out schools that needed substitute teachers. And that was what had brought him to Sonora, his father’s former school.This had been the school his father had run for two short years before he had to step down and focus on his mother’s illness. It had taken a lot of the whole family, but it seemed like things were getting better at home. He hoped for the sake of everyone, and since Joseph lived in another state and had a lot of work, he rarely went to see them.
The Substitute Charms teacher didn’t know how long he was going to stay teaching at Sonora, but he was sure he was going to have a great time doing it. Teaching was always fun to do, in small periods of time, of course. Joseph didn’t know how people actually did this for a living. No, he preferred being in a lab testing and coming up with new exciting charms. He found that a more fulfilling work, than teaching, but he had nothing against helping children learn the material.
It had been a while since he had taught anyone, but the excitement to get to do it was still lingering in his stomach. He arranged his papers and wrote his name on the blackboard before the kids from the beginners class arrived. The clocked chimed and the students began arriving. He waited until the last of the children was in place before introducing himself
“Welcome! I am your substitute professor for charms,” he smiled and pointed to the blackboard. “I am Professor Joseph Regal.”
He hadn’t been with children this age in a long time. His own children were older than the beginner’s class. “Today we are going to do something fun. The charm we are going to practice today is the color-changing charm!” he wasn’t sure if they had already done it before, but it never hurt to review things. It was something that was bound to come in their examinations, or at least it had come in some he had overseen over the years.
“The incantation is Multicorfors and you flick your wrist to the left one time. Look at how I do it.” He did the demonstration and had the teddy bear on his desk from brown to purple. “You have to think about the color you want to the teddy bear to change in order for it to have effect.”
Joseph had placed a teddy bear on each of his students’ desks before they had entered; “Now you can try it. You can work in pairs if you want to! Have fun and if you need me just raise your hand,” Joseph finished his small lecture and hope that everyone would have a good time with this lesson.
OOC: site rules apply! Have fun!
Subthreads: If you go down to the class today.... by Henny B-F-R (Aladren) with Alexandra Devereux, Crotalus, Alex Devereux
Bri...why are you green? by Clara Abernathy, Pecari with Aubrielle Thornton, Teppenpaw, Sub. Professor Joseph Regal, Brielle
Well, it's a start by Jay Carey, Aladren with Thad Pierce, Aladren, Jay
All the colors of the rainbow! by Waverly Canterbury - Pecari with Evan Brockert, Aladren, Waverly
Pretty Colours. by Cepheus Princeton with Carrie O'Malley, Crotalus, Cepheus, Crotalus
Cuuuute! by Melanie Lennox, Teppenpaw with Marcus Crosby, Teppenpaw
They would... by Andrina Thornton, Aladren
Is this right? by Solomon Bensalem, Crotalus
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Sub. Professor Joseph Regal
Beginners class [1 and 2 years]
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Sub. Professor Joseph Regal
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Henny B-F-R (Aladren)
July 04, 2012 2:33 PM
If you go down to the class today.... by Henny B-F-R (Aladren)
Teddies were supposed to be cute and comforting but Henny found the sight of them arranged with military precision along all the desks a tad unnerving. It was a little like the concept of mandatory fun, or care and affection being meted out according to a strict timetable. Something about it just didn't quite gel. Therefore, when the substitute professor – some relation of the former headmaster, perhaps? - instructed them to turn their wands on the critters she had no qualms whatsoever. Not that a spell to change its colour was a particularly gruesome thing to do, unless it went wrong. And, generally speaking, her spells did not.Setting ted up squarely as a target, she decided to turn him a nice Aladren blue. Emotion could be useful in spell-casting, provided it was kept in check. A proportional amount of emotion, a genuine desire to see the results of the spell come to pass, was useful. It was when strong emotion took over and dwarfed one's control that things became problematic. However, pleased as she was to be an Aladren, she didn't think her house pride was going to swell to such an all-consuming level.
“Multicorfors,” she cast, picturing her bear becoming a rich, even blue, and trying to focus on her desire for that to happen. The fur on his middle became a perfect match for the Aladren décor but as it moved towards the edges, the colour paled and eventually faded.
Henny took a moment to gather her thoughts. She suspected the problem was that she didn't greatly care whether the bear was blue or not. Or rather, were she in the position of wanting a blue bear, she would simply buy one that was blue in the first place. Charms faded over time, after all. She supposed it could be possible to want a specific thing in a specific colour and not be able to find it, and then this could be useful. Or perhaps it was handy for people who cared about co-ordinating their bag and their shoes and their accessories. You could save yourself a lot of time and money by just having a few items and colouring them as you wished at the start of the day. Although she rather suspected that people who cared so very much about co-ordinating everything were not the sort of people who restricted themselves to owning a sane number of shoes and so-forth.
Refocussing her attention on the teddy bear, Henny had the idea of turning those areas that hadn't turned blue to black instead, to make him a proper Aladren bear.
“Multicorfors,” she cast, focussing on his ears and paws in her mind. They blackened but the blue she'd previously cast vanished as they did so. “Guess you can't be two artificial colours at once...” she mused to herself. Or at least, he couldn't be the way she'd been doing it.
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Henny B-F-R (Aladren)
If you go down to the class today....
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Henny B-F-R (Aladren)
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Alexandra Devereux, Crotalus
July 08, 2012 7:56 PM
...You may or may not see a very colorful scene by Alexandra Devereux, Crotalus
He had been her professor for two years, so she guessed she was used to him, but that was as much as Alex could really say about Professor Light. She had neither loved nor hated him, and was, now that he was gone, neither delighted nor devastated by his absence. He had been one teacher, but like the Care of Magical Creatures teachers before him, he had gone, and now there was another teacher. A stand-in teacher, anyway; she had gotten the impression this one wasn’t going to stay for very long, just until they could find someone who did want the job semi-permanently.As she came in, she gave the substitute her customary very slight and neutral smile before she decided there was no real difference between one teddy bear and another, went to find a seat, and, for something to do with her hands while she waited for class to begin, began trying to arrange her brown hair into a messy bun, the ‘messy’ part being at least an almost guaranteed success because her hair was fine and she did not have the fancy potions and spells a part at home would involve using to make it go neatly into place. As long as she learned enough about the subject matter and learned it in an organized enough fashion that she could pass her CATS in three years, Alex didn’t suppose it really mattered who taught her Charms, or any other class. She had preferences among the professors, but none of them were anywhere close to things she would call bonds.
Alex let her hair fall, a little wavier for its experience, back to her shoulders when Professor Regal – it was only when she heard it and saw it at the same time, with it up on the board, that it registered with her that he had the same name as Headmistress Jareau’s predecessor, but as she had also lacked strong feelings about him and suspected he’d felt the same way about her, that didn’t bother her, either – called the class to order and told them what they were doing for the day.
Color-changing charms. Well, that could be useful, she thought, if she could learn to make it last any time at all; she suspected it had something to do with spending too much time with Theresa, but she sometimes found she just didn’t like the color of her bag, or her shoes, or something, and was fun to imagine just changing it up sometimes, not for any real reason, but just because.
Of course, learning it also had the benefit of making her pass the exam, which was generally why she learned spells. That, too, was an advantage she wished to have. Short-term goals were usually enough to motivate her in the absence of any good long-term ones that she could figure out.
She looked carefully at the bear in front of her for the first time and decided her earlier assumption about how one was just as good as another was correct. Hers did not look much different from that of the girl next to her, or the one across the row. They were just…bears, nothing special about them that she could see, nothing about them existing that could complicate a spell. She pointed her wand at the bear on her desk, mimicking the gesture made by the professor as nearly as possible, and said, “Multicol - ” before catching herself and biting the far right side of lip, annoyed with herself for stumbling over the word. Just because it felt like it ought to be ‘multicolor’ did not mean it was; that was a first year mistake.
“Multicorfors,” she tried again, very careful to get it right. She supposed being too focused on that, rather than on a color, could have something to do with why the spot of color which washed over the head of the bear was much too pale, not at all what she’d really had in mind. It didn’t cheer her up, exactly, to hear that things hadn’t apparently quite worked out for Henny in the seat beside her, but it did make her feel less annoyed with herself, if only because the other girl seemed to have tried something different than what Alex had thought to do.
“That’s interesting,” she said, looking over Henny’s bear. “I wouldn’t think they would just cancel each other out, unless they were supposed to go over the same part of it.” Then, she thought, the second color would be the one which won out; paints would mix into another color, probably a strange sort of brown, but she had a feeling, if not proof, that it wasn’t like paint. “What was the other color?” she asked, just to see if she’d guessed right.
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Alexandra Devereux, Crotalus
...You may or may not see a very colorful scene
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Alexandra Devereux, Crotalus
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Henny B-F-R (Aladren)
July 09, 2012 1:17 PM
Today's the the day the teddy bears have their fur dyed by Henny B-F-R (Aladren)
Henny looked up from her work and was a little surprised to find that it was Alexandra who was talking to her. Henny didn't know a lot about the other girl, but she knew that was a Crotalus and related to the Careys, all of which led Henny to believe that she was a little bit proper about things. Henny tried not to judge books by their covers but equally she didn't go out of her way to flaunt herself and her DISCUSS and gay pride badge adorned school bag (currently tucked under the desk) in front of people with whom it would start arguments. With those who might take issue, she waited to speak until she was spoken to. But Alexandra was speaking to her perfectly civilly, and she was fairly sure she'd heard people call the girl Alex, which was scarcely the height of formality, so perhaps she was Pure in blood but not in attitude.“Blue,” she replied to Alex's question, “And I suppose that when I was casting that, I was trying to apply it to the whole bear. So, even though I wasn't fully successful, when I tried to add the black, I was adding it to an area that had already been cast on... Let's see what the book says,” she mused, looking up the charm in the index of her text book. Flicking on from the introduction to the charm, wand movement and incantation, she found a subheading. “Here we go, casting multiple colour charms on the same object....
“When casting a color change charm, it will usually be applied to the object as a whole. If attempting to make an object multiple colours, or prevent the charm being applied to the whole object (for example, changing the colour of a purse but not its fastenings) it is important to mentally subdivide the object, focussing – again, for example – on exclusively the body or material of the purse, rather than the whole object. Where no such obvious division applies, e.g. if wanting to make the body of a purse two or more colours, a preparation charm may be necessary, see chapter...,” Henny tailed off, having read what she needed.
“I guess that answers the question then,” she smiled, cancelling the charms she had so far placed on the bear, ready to start again. It felt a little bit like cheating to do the task part by part, when she supposed the idea was to be strong enough at the charm to cast it over an object of approximately that size.
“I might just practise the basic, single coloured bear until I've got that right,” she told Alex. “Then have some fun later if there's still time. What are you going to do yours?” she asked.
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Henny B-F-R (Aladren)
Today's the the day the teddy bears have their fur dyed
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Henny B-F-R (Aladren)
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Alex Devereux
July 13, 2012 8:36 PM
Or at least they'll say they really really tried by Alex Devereux
Alex smiled slightly again, pleased that she had, in fact, guessed it right. Aladrens were a little predictable that way; she wondered if it was something to do with their traits – she thought it would be a little strange if it was, when another of their traits was supposed to be individuality – or with their Quidditch team being held up so high most of the time, or with Alex’s House and year, or even with her personally, instead of anything about the Aladrens. She didn’t mind being a Crotalus, but neither was it anything she considered important; she was more likely to spend time with boys than she might have been otherwise, since Cepheus and Gareth were in her House and her closest female friend was not, but other than that, she regarded Crotalus mostly only as the place she slept at night for nine months out of the year. Between the overachievers, the fighters, the hopeless neurotics, and the few – she sorted herself more or less into this group – who seemed more detached than anything else, she didn’t think there was a Crotalus ‘thing’ for her House to rally around and use as its definition, at least not in the way that Aladren was known as the smart House.She leaned over a little to see Henny’s book as it was read aloud from instead of opening her own when the other girl took the sensible approach to the question and decided to look it up, and nodded as the relevant part was finished. It amused her that the example it used was a purse, but it would take too long to explain why and would go into family things, so she kept that to herself. Being seen as eccentric was not much better than getting into family things. Her family was on the list of topics she thought it was generally better just not to go into; she thought most people knew she was related to Theresa somehow, but it wasn't because she had gone to lengths to publicize the fact.
"It looks like it," she agreed, mildly curious about what was in the passage the passage they'd read referred them to next, but still not enough to look it up herself. She might go over it when she was studying for an exam, since her father said that the best thing to do was always learn a little more than she had to and find a relevant way to slip it into her answers, but not right now in class.
“I’ll turn it purple,” she decided. Alex liked purple; her mother said it made her coloring look even duller than usual – she didn’t see as much difference as her mother seemed to, as they both had brown hair and eyes, just slightly different shades of those, but Victoria insisted that Alex had inherited her father’s coloring, along with his other undesirable physical features; those, she couldn’t argue as well, as there was no trace of her mother in her looks at all – but she had persisted in liking it anyway. “Are you planning to go with blue or black this time?” she asked.
Now that she’d said something about how her bear was to end up, she had to follow through. She focused on a more subdued shade, nothing which would draw attention, and forced that image to the front of her mind as she tried out the spell word on the bear on her desk. “Multicorfors!”
The bear’s head, which her wand had been aimed at, turned a sort of grayish-lavender color, then darkened to something closer to what she had been aiming for, though the tendrils of color reaching down toward its chest abruptly became lighter and kept growing lighter until they were still the gray-lavender color at their ends. Alex smiled slightly to herself as she looked it over. Not bad, she decided, and looked back over to see how Henny had done this time around. "Have any luck?" she asked.
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Alex Devereux
Or at least they'll say they really really tried
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Alex Devereux
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