Professor Danielle Holland
June 30, 2009 5:35 PM
Years 1 & 2: Beginning Transfiguration by Professor Danielle Holland
Danielle Holland was terrified. Absolutely, positively, knee-knockingly terrified. They never mentioned this during college. She'd graduated with honors, as befits a Compia and Terrigena, and she'd been so proud when her application for a teaching position had produced results at the sixth school she'd sent it to. But it wasn't until right now, standing in front of an empty classroom filled with empty seats, twenty minutes before her first class was supposed to begin that the butterflies hit with a vengeance.She wasn't sure if helped or made it worse, knowing that Headmistress - no, Professor, Professor now - Professor Skies was in the room next door, teaching the RATS level class. Danielle was only responsible for the younger years, and only temporarily. She wasn't surprised the school was looking for someone with a little more experience, someone who'd been out of school for a little more than four months, but until such a person could be found, she had a job here at Sonora.
She wrote her name on the board, Danielle Holland, looked at it, then added Professor in front of it. Then she stepped back and looked at it again. How very very strange.
A noise at the door caught her attention and she saw the first of the early arrivals entering the room. She gave the child a reassuring smile, feeling her own butterflies settle at the sight of one of the actual students. They were just children; eleven- and twelve-year-olds in this class. Nothing to be frightened by. She had over ten years on all of them, and though only five one, she should still have height on these guys.
And it wasn't as though she'd never taught before. She'd been all but in charge of the younger classes for Professor Dobb's Theory of Magic at Salem, and she'd been the instructor for Kris's 'independent study' Math course. Plus, Kris had needed tutoring in every subject Salem offered so even today's lesson wasn't new material for her. And those were all before she had a college teaching degree to back her up. After teaching the king of ADHD, a classroom full of first and second years was going to be easy.
Beneath her name, she added, Beginning Transfiguration so the arriving students would know they were in the right place.
Once the chairs were full, she looked out on the sea of young face and smiled. "Hello, everyone. You should all be first and second years, here for Beginning Transfiguration. I am Professor Holland." She paused a moment, to get over that introduction. She was entitled to it, but that did not mean she was used to the sound of it. If she'd had any doubts before, she was now officially grown up. "I will be teaching this class until the school finds a permanent Transfiguration teacher."
"Transfiguration is one of the most difficult disciplines of magic that there is. In this class, you will literally be turning one thing into something else. Obviously, at your level this will not be permanent, but by the end of this class period, most of you will have changed enough of a toothpick's physical characteristics enough that anybody looking at it would have to call it a needle."
She'd been taught using a match instead of a toothpick, but after trying that with Kris, she'd decided the potential for fire was best avoided all together, especially with such a significantly larger class size.
She picked up the box of toothpicks on her desk and started walking up and down the aisles of desks, giving each student three toothpicks. She continued to talk as she did this. "When you get your toothpick, you'll notice that it is made of wood, that it's flat with a rounded top end and pointed bottom end, and that it's about three inches long."
"A needle is made of metal, it's round with a hole for the thread on the top end and a pointed bottom end, and it can be about three inches long. When transfiguring one thing into another, it's important to keep a clear mental picture of both what you have and what you want to have, and what has to change to get from one to the other. That is perhaps even more important than the spell word and wand movements, though, as in Charms, those are what trigger the transfiguration to occur. I'll go over those momentarily."
"This particular lesson is often used for beginner classes because needles and toothpicks do have such similar shapes. It is one less thing you need to change. I realize some of you are second years, and this is probably a great deal of review for you, so if you'd like a greater challenge, you can transfigure your toothpicks into smaller needles, about an inch long."
Reaching the last student and giving him his three toothpicks, she returned to the front of the room and placed the almost empty box back on her desk. "I gave each of you three toothpicks. I only expect one needle at the end of the class, but in case you break one, lose one, or get stuck with a partial transfiguration, you have a couple spares. I have a few more if you need them, but hopefully three should be enough."
Her brown eyes narrowed, "I don't want to see anyone throwing them around. Transfiguration can be a very dangerous class, so I will not tolerate anyone messing around." Kris, her own dear and favorite cousin, had called her a Nazi while she was tutoring him, so she felt little qualms about enforcing an equal strictness on this larger class.
She gave them another few moments of her warning glare, before she drew her wand and held up one of the toothpicks. "The wand motion you'll be using looks like this." She moved her wand point downwards at a diagonal and finished with a flick of her wrist that brought the wand tip back to its original position. "The spell you'll use is Myxanti Nere."
The syllables were foreign and she could see that on some of the faces of the students. She spelled it out on the board then repeated it more slowly, drawing a line under each separate syllable as she said them. "Mix Ann Tea Nair. Emphasis on second syllable, please." She darkened the underline under the 'an' then repeated it all together again, "Myxanti Nere."
"Then you'd put them together." She dropped her wandtip diagonally toward the toothpick, cast, "Myxanti Nere," and flicked the tip back up. The needle held between her fingers gleamed in the sunlight slanting in through the open windows of the classroom.
"Now each of you can try. Feel free to - quietly - discuss your work with your neighbor if you're having trouble. I'm also right here if you have any questions. Raise your hand when you're finished so I can mark you off as a pass. If you don't have a needle by the end of the period, I'll see how far you did get and grade you accordingly. It doesn't have to be perfect - in fact, I'd be surprised if it was - but I'd like to see some change from the wooden toothpick."
OOC: You should all have the idea of how this works now. Standard posting rules apply. Keep all posts to a ten sentence minimum. Be detailed, be creative, have fun. Also, don't feel obligated to successfully complete the assignment; transfigurations are hard. Happy posting!
Subthreads: Sudden urge to find a haystack... by Andrew Duell with Insomnia Zannicci
Here we go... by Marissa Stephenson with Jethro Smythe
On pins and needles by Edmond Carey
Re: Years 1 & 2: Beginning Transfiguration by Bridjalyn Tuppin
You said you were here if we had questions... by Quentin Melcher with Danielle Holland
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Professor Danielle Holland
Years 1 & 2: Beginning Transfiguration
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Professor Danielle Holland
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Quentin Melcher
July 27, 2009 7:11 PM
You said you were here if we had questions... by Quentin Melcher
Quentin typically enjoyed transfiguration. Really, he enjoyed all his classes and he didn't really expect today to be any different. They were getting a new teacher. Not a permanent teacher, but a substitute like Professor Fawcett. As Professor Fawcett was pretty much Quentin's favorite teacher, he was not displeased about this in the least. Substitutes were people he really greatly admired for their ability to teach many different subjects. In fact, some of them were better than some of those considered to be real professors.Of course, there was still the possibility that this new teacher wouldn't be as good at as many things as Professor Fawcett was but hopefully she'd at least be qualified for Transfiguration. And for teaching. There were people who might be good at a particular subject but couldn't teach at all. Quentin's grandfather had fired multiple teachers for that. Teaching was not just knowing, it involved being able to give others that knowledge. Plus, it would help if a teacher was, well, pleasant to the students. It didn't make them not a professor if they gave the students that knowledge and were mean but it tended to be a plus if they weren't.
As he listened to Miss Holland's lesson, Quentin quickly decided that she was indeed a professor, due to the fact that she was teaching them to turn toothpicks to needles. Not the most useful thing ever, but it was a simple starting point for beginning transfiguration. Of course, Quentin had had Transfiguration last year, so he wasn't exactly a beginner but still, it was teaching them to change something into something else.
"I'm also right here if you have any questions."
Oh did Quentin ever have questions! He always had questions and she was there to answer them. The second remembered the incident with Mr. Flatt last year, on his first night at Sonora, when Mr. Flatt had asked them if they had any questions and failed to specify that they had to pertain to what he had discussed. It was silly,really, to have them ask questions about what he had discussed when he'd already discussed it. Professor Holland had also failed to specify that and she seemed a good deal more pleasant than Mr. Flatt so perhaps she had meant that Quentin could ask her anything even if it had nothing whatsoever to do with Transfiguration. She'd even said he could ask multiple questions!
Quentin walked up to the teacher's desk. "Professor Holland, if a vampire bit someone who was drunk would the vampire become drunk as well?"
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Quentin Melcher
You said you were here if we had questions...
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Danielle Holland
August 02, 2009 4:09 PM
Not quite the question I had in mind by Danielle Holland
Danielle looked up as one of the students made his way to the front of the classroom. Her seating chart, charmed in a way that her old Concepts professor had shown her while she'd been his teaching assistant, identified him as Quentin Melcher, an Aladren, and a second year.Being from the Sonora sibling of her own Terrigena House, she anticipated a complex question about the mechanics of changing material from wood to metal or a request for something a little more complex to do since the assignment was so basic.
She was not expecting to be asked a question that more appropriately belonged in a DADA class, and even then was unlikely to come up.
"Would a vampire get drunk from drinking a drunk person's blood?" she repeated the question, to make sure she'd heard it right. When it was clear she had, she gave the hypothetical situation perhaps more consideration than perhaps she should have. Certainly, it never occured to her to not answer to the best of her knowledge. She would never discourage any student from learning by dismissing a question, even one entirely out of the blue.
Eventually, she answered, "I think it would depend largely on how large the vampire is, how much he or she drank, and how drunk the blood source was. In most cases, however, since vampires do have a stronger constitution than humans, I'd have to say it's unlikely they'd get significantly drunk. They might get a little buzzed though. I've never heard of any clinical trials, or anectotal evidence of it happening, though, so I can't guarantee I'm correct. That's just my best deduction given what I know of vampire physiology."
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Danielle Holland
Not quite the question I had in mind
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Danielle Holland
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