Professor Fawcett
August 29, 2010 6:19 PM
Intermediate Potions I (3rd-5th Years) by Professor Fawcett
In light of what he had planned for the intermediate group, along with the vaguely terrified looks he imagined he had been getting since the morning mail had presented each of the Advanced students with a syllabus and an assignment to be done before their first class with him, John feared that he would have a reputation for fearsomeness as was seldom bestowed on a thin, graying man with an almost permanent expression of good-natured disinterest, unremarkable voice, and tendency to try to make jokes with the class after he was sure he had their respect before he ever saw the first years.He wasn't quite sure how he felt about that, but it wasn't relevant. The years being shuffled again meant that he had to assess where each group – except the seventh years, who, without the sixth years in their group to slow it up, he could work hard enough to have a reasonable chance of more Os, or at the very least more Es, than usual – was, ability-wise, again. He had never trusted the usual sorts of tests, as they could be easily manipulated, so his strategy was to push and see if the students folded or pushed back.
Once the large group – he had so enjoyed having roughly equal ones, last year – appeared to be largely present and the bell had rung, John rapped his pointer on the table in front of him to get their attention. “Good afternoon, everyone,” he said. “I realize this is a large class, so I must ask that you all be silent so that everyone can hear when I speak. Thank you…Now, if you could each answer when I call your name off the roll, you know the drill now.” At least, he thought there weren’t any new transfers this year.
Once the roll was complete, he put it away to begin the lesson. “You should have each had a syllabus in front of your seats; please raise your hand if you did not, and otherwise put them in safe places, where you can access them easily.” He kept additional copies, but saw no reason to encourage carelessness by mentioning it at this point. “While I do reserve the right to alter it at will, and issue you with revised copies when I do, this provides you with what you may more or less expect in terms of assignments, homework, suggested readings, and class sessions. I encourage you to take full advantage of it. Don’t be intimidated by the length; there will be many lessons in which you do not all work on the same material, and all of these lessons and assignments are factored into the syllabus.”
Something new he was trying was increasing the amount of differentiation in the classroom, with more chances for students to select which difficulty level or learning format to work with and much more frequent occasions on which the fifth years in particular were given a different assignment outright. Not only was it frustrating for many of them to have to work on the same level as the third years, but it was also potentially detrimental to their development and thus their CATS scores. The experiment might not pan out, but that was why he would be issuing a second syllabus before midterm. If this failed, then he would revert to something more traditional, and if it went well, then those students that cared to and did not require the actual potion as a guide would be able to work ahead on their written assignments during the holidays. “There will also be large and small group discussion periods, in which we will combine our knowledge and expertise in pursuit of greater understandings. These will not, third years, be entirely unlike discussions you had in the beginner’s class, though they will be more intensive and count as a larger portion of your grade. The ability to argue a point well, and with adequate support, both aloud and on paper is essential for all, and not only in Potions.”
“If there are no questions about the syllabus – and I encourage you to ask, now or later, any that you do have, as there may be a quiz over the non-schedule related content at some point – then we shall proceed to our lesson. Third years will be working on the Shrinking Solution, which is a bit trickier than the potions you have worked with thus far because of its lack of exact measurements. Wearing gloves while stirring would be wise. On invertebrates, the potion has the effect of returning the affected creature to an earlier stage of physical development, and it can have unusual and unpleasant effects when ingested by humans as well. Your ingredients are chopped daisy roots, skinned shrivelfig, sliced caterpillar, a single rat spleen, and a dash of leech juice, and you will find instructions on page 12 of your books. You should finish before the end of the period, at which point I ask that you come to the front, take a flask - ” he pointed to a tray of them – “and place a sample of your potion within it, labeling the flask with your name and your partner’s. You may, of course, feel free not to do so, but you will receive a failing grade for the sample if so and have to work extra hard on your homework assignment and your first essay to make up the credit. This applies to all year groups.”
Though he was not a Pecari, and would be mildly offended by the comparison, John was more adaptable than usual in the classroom. When a situation arose that he clearly could not mow over, he adapted and went around it, and when it came to a battle of wills at this school, students were more likely to win, especially once their beliefs came into the equation. For Quentin Melcher, he picked potions with an obvious purpose, and for Jose Hernandez and, when magic came into play as it sometimes did, Marissa Stephenson, he modified the grading structure slightly so that they could find a way to pass with reasonable scores, if they were willing to do especially good written work. Jose, in particular, would never have the grades that those who would do the bloody potions would even if he took every extra credit opportunity offered in the syllabus, but he could scrape a pass. If he chose not to take the opportunity, well, John would fail him without much remorse, but he had enough professional experience and quirks in his family tree to consider that political beliefs, apparently essential to the self-concept of the California Pierces in a way that fascinated his inner sociologist, could be a genuine reason for behavior that acted to one’s own detriment.
And he disliked reporting failures to Sadi. He disliked reporting them to himself when he wrote out the grades in his ledger and filed them. There was no reason for anyone to fail when all that was needed for passing to be an option was for him to bend half an inch and them to put in some extra effort, if the standard effort was somehow worse for them.
“Fifth years – no, fourth years, I haven’t forgotten you – you will be working on the Draught of Peace, a calming agent.“ He was considering modifying the ethics in composition of mood-altering potions discussion he had with the Advanced group to cover with this class, but thought he might see how they reacted to a less…wobbly topic before he made up his mind. “The theory behind it is simple enough, no concepts you are unfamiliar with, but the composition is very difficult and relies heavily on precision and order, which should make it something of a challenge for you after a summer in which I very much doubt measurements were on your minds. I recommend that you work together, in the interests of time, but be very careful not to lose track and allow one to repeat the other’s work. If the vapor rising from your cauldron is anything other than light and silvery, and if the consistency of the potion is not very liquid, then you have made a critical error. If your potion produces green sparks, then please dispose of it at once with the Evanesco charm, or ask me to do so, as it will otherwise explode soon. Your ingredients – “ he tapped the board with his wand, and a list of ingredients and instructions appeared next to the simpler third year one – “are ginger roots, syrup of hellebore, essence of Belladona, powdered moonstone, unicorn hair, and scurvygrass.”
He looked over those students still not flipping through books or taking out supplies. “Fourth years, I am giving you an option. You may work on either the Shrinking Solution or the Draught of Peace, whichever you feel more comfortable with, and you may work together or separately, as you like, if you choose the former. In addition to the homework assignments listed for the third and fifth years, I will also ask you to write an explanation of why you chose the potion you did, how well you feel you did, and whether you would choose the same a second time around. Please be frank, and remember that I will have your finished products in front of me while I read these.” He looked around, then, at the room. “And everyone may, if you have not already, begin.”
OOC: Standard posting rules apply, as do “Potion rules:” you may make mistakes, but deliberate mayhem will lead to IC consequences, and your character need not be a perfect potioneer to get credit for the post. Tag John if you need him, and enjoy yourselves!
Subthreads: Tremendously relieved by Pippa Brockert
Geez, no hesitation with the hard stuff. by Adelita Garcia (Crotalus)
Pondering by Quentin Melcher with Daniel Nash II
Unable to come up with a decent title by Alessa Hinckley with Rachel Bauer
It's a challenge just finding a partner. by Cassie Kerrigan, Aladren with Marissa Stephenson
Will I make a friend today? by Dulce Garcia (Teppenpaw)
A Great Start for Fourth Year! (Professor) by Jose Hernandez with Professor Fawcett
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Professor Fawcett
Intermediate Potions I (3rd-5th Years)
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Professor Fawcett
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Alessa Hinckley
August 31, 2010 9:42 PM
Unable to come up with a decent title by Alessa Hinckley
Potions was a subject Alessa felt rather indifferent to. She wasn't supposed to like it, as that wouldn't be proper but she didn't hate it either, like she was starting to hate Defense. Potions, at least had simple, easy to follow instructions and took time to do. Better yet, it didn't involve any sort of athleticism, which Alessa did not possess.Apparently, they were going to be doing a different potion than the fifth years. Alessa was a bit disappointed. That meant there was no possibility of partnering up with any of them. Her own class was full of the type of loud person that kind of got on Alessa's nerves.Furthermore, there were some awfully hyperactive people-the same ones that were loud mostly-with short attention spans, which were not the kind of person Alessa wanted to depend on for a grade.
She didn't want to be nasty but she had an awfully hard time dealing with people who had to be in constant motion and spoke constantly, jumping from one topic to another. When people did that, Alessa got over stimulated and became a bit irritable, just like when many conversations were going on at once. It gave her a headache and that was not something Alessa needed, especially during Potions which whether she was truly interested in it or not, required her full concentration.
It turned out they, by which she meant the third years, and some Potions deficient fourth years, would be doing the Shrinking Solution. Alessa, being a pureblood, knew a little about what this one did and she would be happy to wear gloves, especially giving that the potion contained rat spleens. Not something the Aladren particularly liked touching. It made her wish to be doing the other potion as it didn’t involve touching anything repulsive.
Actually, to some who hadn’t grown up drinking Potions, such as Muggleborns, it might seem rather revolting to be drinking something that contained rat spleens and sliced caterpillar. But then Alessa was super used to it, (though she’d obviously never drank the Shrinking Solution. Most people didn’t unless they were really really stupid.)but she still didn’t think she liked the way a rat spleen felt, though the Aladren had never actually touched one.
As the professor finished talking, Alessa scanned the room, looking for another third year, preferably a relatively quiet one. Before she could decide who to work with, someone approached her
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Alessa Hinckley
Unable to come up with a decent title
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Alessa Hinckley
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Rachel Bauer
September 02, 2010 2:41 PM
Irrelevant-to-content phrases it is, then. by Rachel Bauer
In Rachel's first year, third years had been grouped with the beginners as often as not, and she had been irritated with the actual work for her year group ever since.She'd hoped that migrating to the intermediate class would help make things interesting again, but it seemed that her luck was not in, at least for the first class of the new year. Fawcett was trying to be all developmentally appropriate or something, with the result that she was going to be stuck working with the others in her year all year again and hoping he didn’t decide that fourth years needed to be dumbed down too by next fall. Once that was established, she spent the rest of his lecture doodling on her syllabus, only tuning into the occasional word or phrase that stuck out somehow as he spoke to the fourth and fifth years.
If certain things which weren’t had been real, then it would have been all right. Half of the American pureblood model was based on the idea of keeping girls safe, thoughtless, and kind of stupid. Princesses in towers, but with short hair and the prince guarding the door instead of coming with a wake-up kiss. Every decision made for them, everyone guiding, all very cooperative and helpful and supportive. The problem was that Rachel thought she might be more realistic than her mother, and as such thought she was highly unlikely to have a place in that model once she was an adult. There were purebloods who would marry her, sure, but they were probably going to be of the same progressive, ambitious model as her stepfather, not the kind her mother would actually prefer.
And Rachel was actually okay with that. This life alternated between boring and stressful, and she wasn’t a fan of either. Boredom in particular was hard for her to deal with. If she was going to do okay in that secondary model, though, she needed actual challenges to improve against, and so far, the only area she could really see herself improving in was lying – and, considering where she’d started off, that didn’t mean as much as it might have.
When they were dismissed to work, she put her pen up and began looking around for a partner. Veronica was no good for this one; she usually worked with guys in Potions. Spotting Alessa on her own, she picked up her things and started walking that way. It had been a while since she’d last worked with her, and keeping everyone’s impression of her proper and adequately positive was important.
“Hi,” she said with a smile once she was within range and thought she’d been spotted. “Want to work together?”
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Rachel Bauer
Irrelevant-to-content phrases it is, then.
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Rachel Bauer
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Alessa
September 03, 2010 2:08 PM
Sounds like a plan by Alessa
Alessa smiled pleasantly as the person who came over to talk to her was Rachel. The Crotalus wasn't her first choice, that would have been Theo but Rachel was intelligent and with her as a partner, Alessa stood a chance of getting a good grade which was more than she could say then if she'd gotten some of the people in her year.More importantly, Rachel was not hyperactive. Alessa was just having one of those days when hyper people were more irritating than usual. She could handle doing the potion, her own ability to concentrate wasn't quite that bad, but if she'd had to work with someone whose wasn't, her own might have been dragged down along with them. Worse, Alessa might have lost her cool and told the said hyperactive person to shut up and pay attention. Which would have been deserved but would also probably make the Aladren look bad.
And, even though as someone raised to be a proper pureblood lady, Alessa was not supposed to actually like Potions, she was also supposed to be able to do them adequately and get decent grades in everything, even what was deemed unfeminine because being able to do magic was an important part of being a wizard too.
All the contradictions were also completely frustrating.
"Absolutely," Alessa replied to Rachel, actually meaning what she said. Lying had never been one of her skills anyway. She was more the type not to say what she thought if she thought someone might not like it. Her mother said that was a good thing but sometimes, Alessa just felt kind of stifled.
She removed her potions kit from her bag and began setting up her cauldron.
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Alessa
Sounds like a plan
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Alessa
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Rachel
September 05, 2010 9:19 PM
They are supposed to be a Crotalus specialty. by Rachel
Well. That was a more enthusiastic reception than she had expected. Rachel couldn't say she was displeased with it, though. People liking her enough to seem genuinely happy about working with her was a good thing. It meant that she wasn't making mistakes.She didn't even know why she cared, considering that it was all bound to fall apart when she left school. Temporary need, she guessed. She needed to be what someone else needed her to be, and Emily and Veronica and their sort were the only ones who would just let her know what they wanted. Her dad liked to pretend that whatever made her and the other girls happy was okay with him, a concept she couldn't get her head around and therefore dismissed as a lie on his part, and Jeremy considered her an inconvenience on top of being one of those people who had an allergy to being open about anything.
The rest of her family...No one was going to please Naomi, Aunt Hannah was even more sentimental than Dad, Uncle Isaac would play nicely with anyone until he saw a way to get something out of them if the niceness hadn't been part of getting something to begin with, and her mother's family were all basically strangers and peculiar besides all the issues that made getting close to them awkward. What would her mother think, for instance, if she earned the approval of Nadia, the woman her mother blamed for breaking up Rachel's grandparents' marriage? And getting on the right side of her maternal uncle or one of her aunts usually involved upsetting one or both of the others. It wasn't worth it.
Alessa was already setting up her own cauldron, so Rachel decided not to contest using it. "Do you want to use my ingredients or split it?" she asked. "I'm fine either way." She wasn't sure how much casual conversation Alessa would like in a new class, so decided to let her set it. She liked chatting a little herself, it made the interaction seem more natural and could help her prevent the part where she began to space out a little, but the problem with working with people was that it usually involved accommodating them.
That was one of the worst things, day-to-day, about the big act. She wasn't good at being a follower, but leaders drew too much attention to themselves.
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Rachel
They are supposed to be a Crotalus specialty.
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Rachel
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Alessa
September 08, 2010 2:48 AM
As an Aladren, mine is supposed to be learning by Alessa
"I suppose we can use your supplies, as we're using my cauldron." Alessa supposed that was the best way to do things. "Unless you're out of anything, than we'll have to use mine, I guess." It didn't make anymore difference to her than it seemed to make to Rachel. Her cauldron was top of the line, despite the fact that Alessa wasn't supposed to even like Potions, because the Hinckleys always had the best of everything, except maybe Uncle Bernard's offspring, because he sort of shunned that kind of stuff and their mom was a muggle anyway.Something that Alessa wasn't allowed to advertise, even though it seemed not to be a big deal anymore. A distant cousin of hers even had a half-blood half-sister. Still she wanted to do what her parents asked even if it made Alessa feel kind of icky inside. Cherry and Johnny were kind of embarassing but the Aladren did like the former at least. The latter was someone Alessa kind of hoped got disowned because he had always scared her. As for Paisley, well, the third year couldn't see anything too improper about her other than her blood. She was sort of a lot like Aunt Honeysuckle but at least Paisley wasn't a criminal and didn't have a Reputation.
As she waited for Rachel to respond, Alessa pondered what to say next. When people were around, she sort of felt it was polite to chat with them. Unfortunately, the Aladren was dreadful at small talk and even what she'd been taught seemed so awkward in a classroom setting. It was more her way to let the other person lead the conversation as Alessa usually didn't know what to say. Granted there were some subjects that she knew nothing about and didn't care about such as Quidditch and if she had to talk about them, Alessa would just sort of check out and nod politely.
It was another reason why she did not want to work with one of the Pecaris in her year. Delilah was nice enough but definitely into the sport and Nina and Jude didn't play but they might still have been fans. Though Theo and Tobar played too but they were not Pecaris and the stereotype was that Pecaris were obsessed and no other interests, such as that one second year boy, Tristan.
Besides, for all Alessa complaints about loud people and too many conversations, it was painfully awkward not to talk to someone she was working with. It was just that she liked to work with people who stayed on one subject for more than five seconds and weren't in constant motion that wasn't related to the work. Someone who didn't fool around in class. In Potions, that could be dangerous, especially when they working on something like the Shrinking Solution which Professor Fawcett said they needed gloves for.
All these contradictions in Alessa's mind frustrated her, as she couldn't articulate the difference between what she did and did not like very well. But there was a fine line between situations that seemed similar and quite frankly, Alessa didn't know how to define them to herself .
"So," she asked Rachel, "how was your summer?" Alessa hadn't actually spoken to the Crotalus yet this year, so it was a perfectly standard question, if a bit dull. But one couldn't just ask random things of someone. Unless, of course they were Quentin, who seemed to have no problem doing so. Alessa, however, while occasionally thinking her distant cousin had a point when he wasn't being entirely irritating, was not like that. She had been raised to be polite and proper and right now she was speaking to someone else who seemed to be polite and proper.
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Alessa
As an Aladren, mine is supposed to be learning
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Alessa
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Rachel
September 17, 2010 10:09 PM
As students, we're all supposed to specialize in that. by Rachel
Rachel nodded shortly to the agreement to use her supplies and put down the container she was carrying, beginning to open it with the hand not on the handle as she did. "I'm reasonably sure I have everything," she said. It wouldn't do for a - whatever she was - to appear unprepared in front of a Hinckley, and that went for all sides of the family. Dad had that whole responsibility thing going, there was no forgetting that her mother and uncle had both been Head Students in their days even if Momma hadn't exactly gotten through all the expected duties, and the Douglases were insanely insecure about their social standing relative to the Big Old Families of the east coast.Personally, Rachel thought that complex was kind of stupid. What was so intrinsically superior about the east coast? It had some cool old stuff, but enough of the things people actually seemed to think were essential had migrated for that to logically have little bearing on the present. There were as many snobby families who engaged in complicated social rituals in California as there were in New York, and some of the families in the interior west managed to keep up the exact manners and customs without any of the open-to-price element that even Kate could see in the circles they mixed with.
No one, however, cared what a thirteen-year-old with a shady past thought about it, though, so she was stuck respecting the system. That meant being very aware that Alessa was from an old eastern family that had stayed eastern.
She was still separating ingredients when Alessa asked about her summer. Rachel guessed that answered the question about small talk. "Oh, it was fantastic," she said. Good things only in this situation. "My stepfather had business in Nice, so we all got to go for two weeks." She paused thoughtfully, then added, "It would have been better if I could actually speak enough Italian to order a steak, but everyone still had a lot of fun. And when we got back, we had to school shop for my sister, and I got some great new things in the bargain." She looked over the list one more time and decided that every container they needed was out in a row on the table. "I'll skin the shrivelfig if you can chop the daisy roots. How was your summer?"
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Rachel
As students, we're all supposed to specialize in that.
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Rachel
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