If they'd told me being a grown-up included all this.... on Charms

Professor Olivers

March 25, 2015 7:59 PM

Introducing the Research Project. [VI & VII] by Professor Olivers

It had been a rather busy morning finding her old graded papers to hand back to the beginner and intermediate class and preparing for the upcoming Quidditch match between Aladren and Pecari. By the time the advanced class rolled around, she was beat. They were her last class of the day and while she wanted to put all of her time and effort into them, today was not really the day to do so. Besides, it was still the beginning of the term which meant her students were going to begin their second research project. She had told them a little bit about it over the break and it was included in their syllabus. While they had no real homework for this term, they had to work on researching a charm they had learned recently in the intermediate class or advanced. They had to present its origins, uses, and any other information surrounding. A controversial charm was one of the best projects in Florence’s opinion only because the media tended to focus more on those than others.

It wasn’t an exciting project unless they chose a charm they really liked, but it did require a visual display of the charm as well as an essay. Afterwards Florence hoped to showcase their projects to the rest of the school during the Renaissance fair. Even if it had nothing to do with the fair, it still showed the other students exactly what the Advanced Charms students did all year long and hopefully would work to draw in more students. Charms wasn’t a class many people dropped because it was so practical, but she knew there were still some who weren’t very fond of the subject. The project was worth most of their grade so Florence gave them an entire term to work on it alongside her lessons.

Once the students walked in, Florence handed out a rubric describing her expectations for their project. “Good afternoon, everyone. I’m passing out the rubric for your research project due at the end of this term before your final exams. You are going to choose a charm that you learned about either in your intermediate class or above and learn everything you can about it. The rubric breaks the project down into three parts: essay, visual display, and presentation. Not only are you going to write me a two-foot long essay about the charm, but you are also required to create some kind of visual to show off the charm. How you present the charm to the rest of the class will also be counted towards your grade so make sure you show up when it is your turn to present. I’ll have signups later this week.

“Today I want you all to start looking into the different charms. It can be a charm we covered in this class or will cover in the next few weeks. If you need any help, please come and ask me. Once you’ve decided, come and tell me and I’ll write it down. There will be no duplicate projects, so it’ll be first-come first-serve. Look over the rubric and go ahead and start thinking about which charm you want to work on. Today is a free work day for you all. You can work in groups if you’d like, but just make sure to keep the noise level down.”

Florence had said all she had to say, so she went back to her desk and readied a piece of parchment to record the students and the charm they were going to present on. Until they approached her, however, she was going to work on finishing her lesson plan for the beginner’s and write out a schedule for the fifth and seventh years to sign up if they wanted extra tutoring before their CATS or RATS.

OOC: You can assume Florence would have approved your charm decision if there are no duplicates. The class lesson is relatively free, but Florence will interfere if it gets out of hand. Creative and longer posts earn more points!

Subthreads:

If they'd told me being a grown-up included all this.... by Julian Umland, Teppenpaw with Gemma Bennett, Teppenpaw

I'm not pleased to make it's acquaintance by Amity Brockert, Aladren

0 Professor Olivers Introducing the Research Project. [VI & VII] 0 Professor Olivers 1 5

Julian Umland, Teppenpaw

March 31, 2015 5:03 PM

If they'd told me being a grown-up included all this.... by Julian Umland, Teppenpaw

Advanced classes, according to Julian’s mom, were difficult for one reason: to prepare them all for the real world. They did this in three ways: by pushing them to develop their wand skills and degree of control over their powers as far as each was capable of (which was why they were taught nonverbal spells), demonstrate that they understood what they were doing as much as they demonstrated the ability to do it (which was why they were assigned so much writing), and to get them used to making decisions and living with the end results (which was why they were given so much freedom to decide their own topics and specific areas of study).

Advanced classes were also, Mom had said in so many words, doomed to failure. It would take even the best of them many more long years of even harder work to really achieve mastery in any area. If they were diligent, though, Advanced classes would at least give them a good landing to start climbing the stairs from, or maybe even a few steps for the very best.

Julian did not think she was going to be one of the very best, but she did think her mother had been. Which was just another piece in a puzzle which had begun to bother her over the past two years. If her brother Paul – the only one of them really in Mom’s league intellectually – decided to dedicate his life to small causes and the care and education of smaller children, Julian was sure they would all consider the decision a waste of potential and resources, and while he had pronouns working in his favor in a way Mom did not, he was also a Squib. Even modest magical talent elevated women who had it above men who had no powers at all in the pecking order of Those Who Knew, and Julian wasn’t at all convinced that Mom’s powers would prove overly modest if she ever chose to use them to their full extent. So why was she where she was?

If she could just figure it out…well, Julian didn’t quite know that, either, the nature of ‘if.’ Just that something important would be accomplished if she could figure it out. Somehow – she had no idea how she might go about doing that, either, at least not without being a lot less polite in-family than Mom had raised her to be. There were questions that could be asked and questions that could not even between family, at least by someone as old as her. She was old enough to understand what was not spelled out to her, now.

Other things, though, were easier to figure out. Slightly. The material in Advanced classes and how to deal with the work were among these. The first few months had been awful, but slowly, Julian had started to find topics she found interesting enough to pursue on her own, then to find links between them, which had led to things to read for the next project and then the next. She had spent part of midterm revising her Potions portfolio, touching up things she had come to understand better since she began it. She thought this half of the year was going to go better than the first half had; it would still be hard, but not like before. Maybe.

Professor Olivers bolstered that idea a little. The project sounded intimidating the moment it fell on her ears, but looking at it unemotionally and on paper, it really wasn’t that bad. Two feet of parchment was probably not even three pages of paper, which was nothing; Mom had her write that much over half the books she read, and on much narrower topics, too. Deciding what to leave out and starting early enough to write at her own pace and avoid hand cramps were going to be more challenging than just filling up the space. The other two components…well, she wasn’t sure what was meant by ‘visual display’ if it wasn’t, as the inclusion of a second ‘presentation’ category implied, ‘do the spell in front of people,’ but those were the challenges, and they would only be as challenging as she made them for herself.

Once they were released to look into spells on their own – in control of their own time, essentially, and whether or not it was used well or wasted, as long as they kept a reasonable amount of quiet; well, Julian supposed more than half the class was legally grown, now, including her, strange though that still was to think of – Julian opened her book and looked over the index. She had thought about this project over midterm, too, and had an idea for what to do about it, but wasn’t sure she was good enough to commit to it. There was plenty of information, and she could even think of a second visual presentation, but the performance part might get her into trouble. She had mastered casting atmospheric charms on little boxes very quickly, for her, but anything larger....

Julian flexed her hands. Well, it would make a good show – if she could do it. It was, as far as she knew, impossible to know just how magically powerful one was until something was attempted and did not work, either simply…not working or else backfiring horribly. Weather magic could be very powerful; the muddled memory of a few ancient queens who’d happened to be witches and good enough at it to use the weather as a weapon had even made it into Muggle fairy tales. Julian was positive she was not powerful enough change the weather over much area at all, probably not even over her own rather small house, but for all she knew, a spell which had only been meant to influence an area as big around as her desk and as tall as the ceiling of this room could possibly strike her with lightning if it backfired. If she had the gestures and words right, it would probably not do that, but making a fool of herself in public by just failing did not sound very appealing, either. Picking something easier would prevent that, but taking the chance would look better if it worked. The correct path was, ultimately, going to come down more to what she valued more than to anything like logic; what the reasonable approach was depended a lot on what she decided her goal was.

"Sometimes I hate being grown up," she muttered under her breath, looking at a random page in a book without really taking it in.

16 Julian Umland, Teppenpaw If they'd told me being a grown-up included all this.... 254 Julian Umland, Teppenpaw 0 5

Gemma Bennett, Teppenpaw

April 12, 2015 11:29 PM

...I'd have run away by Gemma Bennett, Teppenpaw

Gemma Bennett rarely thought about violence at all, and when she did, she usually didn’t like the thoughts. Why people wanted to hurt each other was beyond her. Why couldn’t people just sit down and talk it out, maybe with someone – preferably some half-Teppenpaw, half-Aladren hybrid creature, logical but not as cold and arrogant as a lot of the Aladrens at least looked to outsiders, though her younger brother said they weren’t really that way and ‘it’s just a communication thing, Gem – we like each other – usually’ – impartial in the middle to help them know when they weren’t seeing things clearly? If more people would do that, then the problem would get solved and no one would have to go to jail and everything would be much nicer.

When she thought about people who considered Advanced Charms an easy class, though, Gemma abandoned her usual principles and beliefs, or what passed for them, about violence. When she thought about those people, she just wanted to punch them in the face.

As class began, Professor Olivers handed out a rubric for a research project, and it took all Gemma’s self-discipline to accept it with a smile and suppress the desire to cry. Crying wouldn’t do any good, after all – it would just make her look stupid and weak in front of the others, and while she would have happily let them consider her anything if it would have actually gotten her out of more of this, she knew Professor Olivers most likely couldn’t and almost certainly wouldn’t let her bypass the requirement even if she lay down on the floor and screamed. Which she had occasionally thought about doing, too. At the very least, though, she could maintain some dignity – not shame her family – even if she couldn’t do anything else, so she forced herself not to think about it when she wanted to scream or cry or ask one of the boys how he’d feel about getting more closely acquainted in one of the darker corners of the library or do any number of other wild, stupid things that sometimes occurred to her just to take the edge off the constant strain that came with Advanced classes. What had been so wrong with the way classes used to be, where they just learned a spell and then cast it over and over again until it worked? Why did they have to know all about how it worked and why it worked and who had first figured out how to make it work now? What did any of it matter?

There were two pieces of good news – that they had class time to work in and that they could do spells they had learned in late Intermediate. Gemma knew she could do those spells and knew she was going to do one of those spells. Spells, in and of themselves, were less interesting than shoes – at least you could tell a lot about a girl from her shoes, and whether or not a man was tidy from his. All the spells she would ever cast did the same practical things no matter who cast them, which meant the only difference in projects for her lay in how much more stressful they made her life for the next few weeks.

She glanced at her roommate when Julian, looking at books, muttered something to herself. “I’m sure I agree, whatever it is,” Gemma said brightly. “Do you know what to do? I’ve been trying not to think about it so long that I have no idea.” She had thought about it, to dread it, but still had no ideas, and she could say nearly anything that entered her mind, true or not, to Julian anyway. Willow’s family probably stood above Gemma’s, which made holding her tongue around her extremely important – the Collinses were somehow-or-other cousins to the Brockerts and might carry tales of any bad behavior of Gemma’s back home and mess things up for Gemma’s brother Paul – but she could babble however to Julian, whose family did not even have feet, which made it easy to like her, especially since she’d started wearing better shoes and her brother had apparently turned out to be a lot less annoying than Gemma’s brother Leo had thought he was going to be. If she looked a little stupider than she really was, that was all right; at worst, it might make Julian feel a little better about things, since she was poor but Gemma had always thought of her as one of the smart people.

0 Gemma Bennett, Teppenpaw ...I'd have run away 251 Gemma Bennett, Teppenpaw 0 5

Amity Brockert, Aladren

April 17, 2015 10:59 AM

I'm not pleased to make it's acquaintance by Amity Brockert, Aladren

As far as Aladrens went, Amity was a bit atypical. Most of those in her house loved schoolwork or at least that was people assumed. However, while she didn't mind learning on her own terms, she disliked anything that was remotely hard work.

So when Professor Olivers announced the research project, she felt rather queasy. Doing one was an unimaginable amount of work, of time spent out of class studying for it, which would cut into Amity's precious free time. Just because she had it more often now than when she lived with her parents-five minutes of free time was more than that-didn't mean she wanted to give up more than one necessary second. In fact, Amity had become quite accustomed to leisure.

Soon, she'd be graduating and be having nothing but. A thought that was tantalizing, never really having to do any sort of work again. However, now there was...this. Plus, though Amity didn't need an O, it would be displayed at the Renaissance Faire for all to see, which meant putting more effort into it than she otherwise would have.

This was made especially bad by the fact that it was their second research project this year. The seventh year hadn't liked doing the first one, and she liked doing this one even less. Honestly, this was cruel, couldn't they just walk through fire instead like Ryan's class had done when he was in Advanced Charms?

Come to think of it, there was an idea. The Flame Freeze Charm. It was something actually relevant to a Renaissance Faire, given that the Renaissance took place during the period of history when Muggles attempted to burn witches and wizards. Magical folk had escaped by casting the charm and apparating away. Of course, Amity didn't know how that worked for those underage. She really didn't like the idea of children being burned alive and she felt nauseous enough about the amount of work this would be without thinking of something so dreadful.

Yes, that was what Amity was going to do. And she was going to grab it quickly, before anyone beat her too it. She got up, let Professor Olivers know what she was doing, grabbed a relevant book and looked for someone she wanted to talk to, figuring that even if they were doing different things, it still would make time go quicker if they socialized while they looked for spells. Amity personally got very frustrated with just concentrating solely on work. Spotting someone she actually liked, she approached. "Hi, decide on what you're going to do yet?"

11 Amity Brockert, Aladren I'm not pleased to make it's acquaintance 233 Amity Brockert, Aladren 0 5