This isn't working as well as it could. on Defense Against the Dark Arts

Professor O'Leary

December 28, 2008 4:06 PM

Sixth and Seventh Years: Lesson 1 by Professor O'Leary

With the midterm break and the holidays fast approaching, keeping the students’ attention was more difficult, but thankfully, this wasn’t as much of an issue with the sixth and seventh years that were now entering the room. Drake supposed part of it had to do with the fact that they were older, more disciplined, or maybe it was just that they were used to the routine by this point. Whatever the reason, it generally made teaching the lesson either. It also helped that they had chosen to be here, to learn. Now, all he had to do was provide them with the knowledge.

As usual, he didn’t go into any pleasantries. There were no statements of greeting or asking how everyone was doing. Instead, he began his lesson, “Before attending Sonora, did any of you experience unusual occurrences, more than likely the cause of casting accidental magic? Often, before training, young wizards and witches cast magic unintentionally when the child is emotionally charged. This may occur in the form of a want, such as wishing for a cookie that he’s not allowed to have and have it come floating to him, or from need, such as windows shattering, because the child is scared.”

He paused a moment, allowing them each to think of occurrences within their childhood, before continuing his lecture, “So, if we are able to cast magic from a young age without the use of a wand or incantation, why do we bother to use them?” Another pause. “Wands act as conductors for our magic. They help provide direction. Without it, spells aren’t as powerful. The incantations help to deliver a focus to our mental and physical conditions for the spell to be successful. Without the incantation, the magic might be powerful, but may have unintended consequences, because the magic is unfocused, such as breaking items.

However, it is possible to cast spells with neither a wand nor an incantation. Seventh years, you may remember last year, we worked on Non-Verbal, or Incantationless, magic. Today, we will begin focusing on Wandless magic. While it is possible to cast all spells without the use of a wand, it is extremely difficult to do, even by the most talented of wizards, and the spells tend to be weaker than if using a wand. So, if the spell is weaker, why bother learning to use magic without a wand? Simple enough. Wands can be broken, forgotten, unreachable, or taken away. Wandless magic depends only on the wizard,” Drake informed his students.

His lecture finished, it brought the class to what they would be doing specifically. “For this lesson, all you’ll need is your wands,” Drake said for anyone that had foolishly left their wand with their belongings, which with any obvious application class would have been left on and near the desks that were against the walls. “First, you’ll be working with a charm that you may have already learned, Accio, the Summoning Charm.” He wasn’t sure if they had actually already learned what he was about to teach or not. If they had, then they would be able to move on to the second part after a review.

“Except instead of summoning a pillow or some other item, you’ll be summoning your wand. To do so is simple, it’s just like summoning anything else,” he said, as he placed his wand on his desk and moved away enough of a distance. “Accio wand.” His wand came flying towards his open hand. “If you have already tried doing this, then this will be a nice review. Otherwise, it’s a good basis. Either way, I want everyone to try it at least a couple times. Once you have this part down, I want you to find a partner for the second part.

When first learning Wandless magic, we start with the most basic spells, so we’re going to be working on casting Expelliarmus and Protego. I want everyone to take turns not using a wand. One person will cast minor spells using a wand while the other attempts to first protect against their partner and then disarm their partner without the use of a wand. If you need any help or have any questions, I’ll be around.” He would also be taking the time to see where the Seventh years might be rusty since they would soon have R.A.T.S. “You may begin.”

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Subthreads:

A showman's trick by Saul Pierce

This isn't working as well as it could. by Anne Wright

Ducking in at the last minute. by Geoffrey Layne

0 Professor O'Leary Sixth and Seventh Years: Lesson 1 0 Professor O'Leary 1 5

Saul Pierce

December 30, 2008 1:18 PM

A showman's trick by Saul Pierce

Saul was not the best student in Professor O'Leary's class. Saul would even go so far as to say he was the worst student in the class. He'd managed to scrape an A on his CATS, but he'd already let six homework assignments slip by completely and four others had been turned in late. His Defense notes were interspersed with notes on the Pecari concert and the latest tallies on where he thought he stood in the Head Boy contest.

But with the Head Boy election upcoming, he was careful to always pay just enough attention in class that he couldn't get caught out by a sudden question (not that he would know the right answer, but he would at least be able to parrot back the question and make something up that sounded good to him - or sounded funny). He also made a point to raise his hand voluntarily once every week or two and offer an answer he thought might be right. It wasn't always, but he was averaging about 75% accuracy for those answers.

And while he was still forgetting homework assignments, he had only twice lost the thread of the lesson badly enough that he had to ask what the class assignment was.

This wasn't one of those times.

Today, his notebook was back in his bag beside the wall. Without a quill and paper to occupy him, he'd even paid more attention than normal to the class, thinking back to the story he'd heard several times from several different sources about the first time he'd fallen off a stage (there had been several such occasions). He had apparently bounced harmlessly off the blacktop below without so much as scrape. That part, everyone agreed on.

As his father told the story, he'd then clapped, laughed, and said, "Again!" As Simon told the story, he'd bounded up, ran back up onto the stage, and jumped off on purpose. As Mom told the story, he'd screamed on the way down, sat quietly stunned on the ground for a moment, and then began to cry only when she came running. As Aunt Regina told it, he'd bounced on his head and hadn't been quite right since. As Uncle Harvey told the story, he'd gotten back up and demanded food - pizza, in some versions, a juice box in others, sometimes candy, or least commonly - and Saul refused to believe this for a second - tofu.

As Saul had reportedly been only two and a half at the time, he couldn't remember which of them (if any) was telling the truth. He wanted to believe Dad, feared it was Mom, and thought if it happened today, he'd do as Simon described. Or maybe, depending on how hungry he was, he'd act as Uncle Harvey said he had. But not the tofu version, not even if he landed on his head like Regina said.

Saul took out his wand when Professor O'Leary told them they'd need them, even for the class on wandless magic. Overall, Saul thought the assignment sounded pretty easy. It was just a summoning charm and a couple easy Defense spells, all of which he knew well enough to do half-asleep. He was pretty sure he'd once summoned his robes to him using a pencil by mistake. He'd been largely asleep at the time, though, so he wasn't sure. But the charm hadn't worked quite as flawlessly as it normally did, and the stick had felt unusually clumsy in his hand, and he'd later found a yellow #2 pencil in his pocket's wand loop.

He put his wand down and took three backwards steps and managed to walk into at least one other person in the process. After apologizing, he held his hand out in front of him, toward the wand, and cast, "Accio Saul's wand." As there were a number of unattended wands in the immediate vicinity, Saul was careful to be very precise about which one he wanted coming toward him. Saying accio food while standing next to a kitchen had made it very clear that being specific was a definite advantage when using the summoning charm. It wasn't a lesson he was likely to forget for a very long time. He was just glad he hadn't wanted a knife.

The wand came flying back to him, and Saul caught it easily and with a little flourish. Awesome. He grinned and put it back in its original position. Careful not to run into anyone else this time, he backed up a little further than before. He struck a more dramatic pose this time as he cast, "Accio Saul's wand!" and did a little twirl and spin as he caught it. Oh, yeah. Wandless magic would look awesome on stage. He could probably even throw in some slight-of-hand thing in with his left hand while the audience watched the wand come to him and tried to find the wires. Simon said there was an art to making real magic look fake, and Saul thought he could make a decent act with it. He'd be old enough soon to start soloing if he could come up with a good routine.

Who would have thought he'd learn one of his best tricks in DADA? He silently thanked Briony's existence for convincing him to continue the class.

Having returned the wand to its launch point for one last time, Saul moved away and presented himself to an imaginary audience and held out his right hand and arm to the side, toward the wand. He imagined introducing himself (or having one of his relatives introduce him) and then turned his head toward the wand. "Accio Saul's wand." He cast, lowering his voice for the last two words, as they were not nearly as dramatic sounding as just the latin. There was a very brief hesitation, then as the wand came to him, he brought his left hand up, twirling a quarter around and over his knuckles. He caught the wand with a spin and flourish and poised it over the coin.

Potential. That could seamlessly lead into a transfiguration of some kind. He'd have to work on the details more. He'd need something flashier than a quarter to bring out with his non-wand hand, though. Maybe a bird. Or Roni. Yeah, Roni would be good. Roni could work.

Spotting somebody looking at him, Saul grinned, palmed the coin, twirled his wand into its pocket like a gunslinger dropping a sixgun into a holster, and asked, "Need a partner for the second part?"

\r\n\r\n

1 Saul Pierce A showman's trick 82 Saul Pierce 0 5

Anne Wright

January 01, 2009 8:02 PM

This isn't working as well as it could. by Anne Wright

Since adding the Concert to her list of obligations to meet in her seventh year, Anne had been paying more attention to her appearance. Nothing dramatic - she didn't want to think about the rumors that might start - but she wore a touch of make-up, now, and kept her nails filed. Her blue sweaters - no two of them were the same shade, but there wasn't one in her wardrobe that could be called another color - went just as poorly with her green robes as they did every winter she spent at Sonora, but Anne looked more put together than she had since third year.

She had made the decision to clean up a little not for her vanity, but from the conviction she could allow no one, in or out of her circle, to think for one second that she was cracking up under pressure. There was nothing she could do about the occasional anxious episode, but she was sure the way she looked could outbalance the way she acted. Anne knew she was all right, but didn't trust those in the positions of authority above hers to take her word on that when her idea of how to deal with a bad day was to throw a heavy object at the wall.

Really, more people ought to try that. It would lead to the biggest decrease in violence against others ever.

She felt her shoulders tighten at the mention of accidental magic. It was an involuntary reaction; accidental magic, hands down, were the two words she hated more than any others in the English language. She had always been a moody kid, and even now, when her training was almost done in the practical sense, she still sometimes got so angry or scared that she lost control. She was the reason no one had realized Lavinia Layne was a Squib until her school letters failed to arrive, and Gray had been blamed for things she'd done several times the year before he started at Sonora. It wasn't, for those and other reasons, something she liked to think about.

The content of the lesson sparked both interest and dread. Wandless magic - controlled wandless magic - held a place on the list of things she had always wanted to learn about. It had the old allure of a challenge, something she didn't feel as much as she once had. Unfortunately, it was also, from the theory she'd read, dangerous. If she was on the Pitch with her reasoning, she'd either be brilliant at it or be the girl who burned down Sonora.

Maybe she should have taken Divination after all.

All right, she told herself, putting her wand down and backing away from it. She didn't like that; she could almost number how many times she'd had it out of reach in the years she'd owned it on one hand. Focus. Just work on Summoning the wand. Just that. She nodded silently to the thought. Looking at what was right in front of her was the only way to do anything. Trying too much to study the big picture would just make it impossible to get even part of the assignment done, and that wouldn't do.

She had achieved some proficiency with nonverbal magic, but decided to try speaking aloud at first. Doing it in steps - starting with verbal wandless instead of jumping into doing nonverbal wandless - irked her because it felt like she was underachieving, but she thought it would probably work best that way. Extending her hand and feeling a bit foolish, she said, firmly, as if giving an order, "Accio!"

Her wand...jumped. That was the only word she could think of. It shot up a foot in the air all at once, then fell - unceremoniously, which seemed incongruous to her - to the floor. Anne felt the sinking sensation of disappointment, which bloomed into frustration. She bit her lip and tried to focus on not being frustrated. The stupidest thing she could do in this lesson was lose her temper and cause her notebook, or someone else's, to explode.

As her attempts to get the wand to finish the trip from its position to her hand continued to fail, Anne became acutely aware of the people around her pairing off. The class was a good-sized one, by Advanced standards, but not large enough to get lost in. She was - barely - keeping her temper under check, she wasn't shouting, but everyone in the room had to be aware that she was failing to perform the spell that had been asked of her. "Accio my wand!" she snapped.

Expecting another failure, she started to let her hand drop almost as soon as she finished the incantation. Because she did that, her wand smacked her arm before gravity took over and put it on the floor. As she picked it up, her hands and legs felt shaky. She focused on breathing slowly.

It was a bad start, but it could be improved upon. Would be improved upon. This was not going to beat her. She, Anne, was better than that.

Since she knew from experience, mostly gained in two years, that she never looked anywhere near as bad as she felt when she got like this, she looked for and found another student not yet paired off. "Partners?" she offered, praying they'd have better sense than to mention how long it had taken her to Summon her wand. She didn't want to go there right now.

16 Anne Wright This isn't working as well as it could. 59 Anne Wright 0 5

Geoffrey Layne

January 05, 2009 9:44 PM

Ducking in at the last minute. by Geoffrey Layne

Geoff wasn't sure what he should expect of Advanced Defense Against the Dark Arts. Logically, it was just going to be a next-to-last step up the primary ladder for the subject, as all his classes were, but he couldn't help half-expecting a slightly more...dramatic syllabus for the class than logic suggested. Maybe it was just knowing O'Leary. Or just knowing Anne, whose ability to make anything sound twice as mysterious, romantic, and important as it actually was knew no bounds.

That illogical part of his brain was disappointed to hear a discussion about accidental magic. Accidental magic was the high point and the curse of a magical parent's life, as its development meant they hadn't produced a Squib but did have to worry about property damage and the chance that a Muggle neighbor would see too much too often and, convinced they'd seen the impossible, go crazy. His parents must have almost gone crazy themselves, with him and Helena and Anne all too close together for anyone to be sure who did what when they all got upset at once, which had been much more common than any of them getting upset separately.

Now, he thought a lot of the more...interesting displays of magical prowess had been Anne's. Only children had problems with perspective when it came to what was and wasn't worthy of violent emotion, and as much time as she'd spent hanging out at his house instead of her circus, Anne had still very much been an only child.

Things got a bit more interesting once they'd all had a bit to think about their early uses of their powers. Nothing on the grand scale, but they had to start somewhere. Doing his best to imitate the distance from his wand O'Leary had been during the demonstration, he said "Accio wand", sure something would happen.

Nothing did.

He considered what he'd done and where it probably became the wrong thing to do. Too casual, he decided, not enough focus. "Accio," he tried again, and this time, the wand jumped about a quarter of the way to him.

On his fourth try, he got the wand to come to him. That was good, for a first lesson when he'd never practiced wandless magic before. He didn't make work for himself; Anne and the school created quite enough between them to satisfy him and make sure he was never bored, and he spent the time neither of them took up working on his music or, sometimes, reading completely non-academic texts.

The second part was bound to be a little harder, but Geoff wasn't worried about it. He had the basics down, and there were seldom real complications for him once he learned the basics.

16 Geoffrey Layne Ducking in at the last minute. 72 Geoffrey Layne 0 5