Professor Fawcett
February 22, 2010 11:59 AM
Lesson Two for Beginners (1st and 2nd Years) by Professor Fawcett
One of the things John almost enjoyed about Sonora was the difficulty involved in teaching several grades of students in one classroom at the same time. The years had different essays, of course, and sometimes he took the easy path and just gave them different potions entirely, but he tried to manage the issue principally through balance. If this week featured an especially tricky potion, next week would be a little easier on the first years, and vice-versa. He knew, of course, that it wasn't a perfect solution, but expected it was largely satisfactory for most of the students.Not all, though, which was why he was trying to work out a better program for next year. Cynicism, for him, was still more a habit than a firm system of belief, and part of his brain retained the idealistic idea that, with effort, most things could be brought close to an optimal state. For now, though, there was class on a challenging day.
"Good day, everyone," he said. "If you could respond when I call your name off the roll...Thank you..."
When that was done, he put away the roll and began his pre-written lecture. "Today, we'll be working on the Shrinking Solution. Have any of you heard of this potion before?" He glanced around the room for any raised hands. "Yes, well, it is more or less what the label says...With one interesting little quirk. If ingested by a living creature, it has been observed to reverse the aging process. This effect can be...extreme, which is why humans should never attempt it."
Perhaps it was just having grown up in the Muggle world and having his brother still very much in it, but it had often occurred to John just how some parents of Muggleborns might react if they knew how dangerous the things their children were exposed to on a daily basis were. Of course, magic had the ability to put many of them right very quickly, but... It was a fact of the universe that anything that could go wrong, eventually would go wrong. He hoped it never happened on his watch.
“Your ingredients, as you can see on the board, are chopped daisy roots, skinned shrivelfig, sliced caterpillar, a single rat spleen, and a dash of leech juice.” He grimaced slightly himself at the imprecision of the measurement, though it was what the textbook said. It was one of the things that made this potion trickier than most of the early-year material. “Better to be a tad conservative with that than too liberal.
“You will work in groups of two to compose this, with each group bottling a flask for grading at the end of class. If all goes well, you should finish within about five minutes of the end of class, during which we will discuss your homework assignments. You may begin.”
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Professor Fawcett
Lesson Two for Beginners (1st and 2nd Years)
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Professor Fawcett
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