Professor Xavier
October 21, 2016 11:30 AM
Advanced Herbology ... sort of by Professor Xavier
Nathan stood at the center of his smaller greenhouse. The school had constructed two of them last year, one for larger classes like the beginners and intermediates, and this one, designed for a smaller group working with larger and more dangerous plants. Such plants were not yet present as none of the current students in the school were yet qualified to work with such specimens.In fact, of the handful of 'advanced' students presently gathering around him, the majority had no herbology background at all, as no class had been offered last year to the now seventh years. He therefore considered his planned curriculum for this group to be highly subject to change, depending on how the sixteen and seventeen year olds handled the early material.
Fortunately, it was a small group, with less than ten kids in it, and they all wanted to be here, so that ought to help them move through the material quickly. He was hopeful that the couple of sixth years at least would be ready to earn at least a CATS for the subject anyway. Certainly by next year if not this year, and the CATS would be an optional opportunity to anyone in the advanced class this year, if they wanted to try for it. The RATS, however, was completely out of the question this time around and would not be offered for at least another year, and even then that would depend entirely on whether John and Tobi chose to take and managed to pass their herbology CATS this year.
"Hello," he greeted them when they had all arrived. During their first day of class, he had revealed his course goal to cover most of the five years worth of CATS material in a single year, and then spent the two weeks since then teaching and drilling them on basic vocabulary, common plant structure and anatomy, best practices in growing and harvesting, methods of distinguishing whether a plant had any magical properties, and reviewing many of the plants they had already learned about through potions.
"We've covered a lot of theory already," he congratulated them on their progress up to this point, "and in two weeks, we have discussed almost everything I cover in the entire first half of the year in a beginner class. Today, you can all finally get your hands dirty," in a herbology class, this expression was a literalism, "as we are going to be sorting through some of the planting trays our beginners and early intermediates put together last week. I want you all to, first of all, try to figure out the type of plant they were sowing, then identify any mistakes they might have made and correct them. Each of you should have three trays of young sprouts in front of you and an evaluation sheet beside each one. Please record what you see as having been done right, as well as what was done wrong and how you corrected each problem you find. There is a letter on the top of the paper and a matching letter on the tray, so make sure you write your observations on the correct sheet so I can compare it to my own notes on the same tray. Each tray has only one type of sprout in it, which may be the same or different from your other trays, but you should each have one tray that was done very well with two or fewer mistakes, and two trays that had multiple mistakes numbering between five and ten."
"Good luck, class, you have the first hour of class to work on this. You may converse and collaborate with your neighbors, but each of you is responsible for turning in your own three evaluation papers to me and putting your corrected trays on the back shelf when you are done," he pointed to the collection area in question. "Then we'll spend the last hour covering chapter four in your text book, which you should have read over the weekend, so if you finish early, you can review that. If you have any questions, please come see me."
OOC: Welcome to Advanced Herbology. The younger years would have worked on planting nettles, leaping toadstools, lavender, and puffapods; you can select whichever of those are in your trays, and whatever mistakes you might find like too close together, not deep enough, etc. You should all know the posting rules by now. Have fun!
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