Professor Fawcett
December 11, 2009 2:47 PM
Intermediate Potions, Lesson One (4th and 5th Years) by Professor Fawcett
For the first few weeks, John had gone relatively easy on the Intermediate group. Their potions had all been fairly straightforward, and while he'd critiqued their arguments in discussion and writing, he hadn't decimated them with the skill of one who'd spent most of his adult life going through the rubbish Magisociology students liked to write in an attempt to sound as though they understood things as or more thoroughly than their teacher. He'd let them have a bit of a breather before they got to the truly mind-wrenching CATS prep, to get back on their feet after the summer if they, like most children, hadn't seen fit to stay mentally alert during their holidays.He knew this had probably also lulled them into a false sense of security, though that had not exactly been his intention. Anyone who had studied his syllabus and looked ahead in the book would know that things were going to get harder. Things had to; the CATS were not exams famed for their simplicity. Many of them would not be with him next year, that was certain, but by Milton and Keats alike, if any of them failed to make the score necessary to continue on, it would be through no fault of his.
"Good morning, class," he said. "I trust you have all found your papers on the properties of armadillo bile in the basket. If that is not the case, please do so after class. A good job overall, though I would advise some of you to consult a few more sources while writing a formal paper. It is a mark of the skilled researcher that he or she never trusts to any one source alone, as all sources have bias. That is an essential truth to remember, especially once you enter your Advanced classes."
He rapped the board with his wand, causing a list of potion ingredients and instructions to appear on the board. "Today we will examine the Draught of Peace." A potion which, he'd discovered, brought him no peace to have in the text for the class, as there was always the worry that one of the students, cracking up under the stress of exams, would try it on his own, make a mess of it, and end up poisoned. He had an oddly good memory of being a student, and knew that teaching it was more or less the only way to prevent that from happening; in his day, there had been a black market in the stuff among fifth and seventh years. "This is a more complex potion than you will have seen before in your education, very fiddly and easy to get wrong. At best, a single mistake will make it useless; at worse, you could be poisoned or badly injured in an explosion."
Unfortunately, and strangely to him, many adolescents were convinced they were invincible and could never be injured - that being poisoned or blown up was something that happened to someone else. Magical education did something to knock a little more of that out of students than the Muggle system had done to his brother and cousins, as most students saw at least one nasty accident before they got out of Beginners, but he could only hope it was enough here. "The ingredients are ginger roots, syrup of hellebore, essence of Belladona, powdered moonstone, unicorn hair, and scurvygrass, all of which you can find in the back cabinet if you are running short. Instructions are on the board; I don't want you flipping around in textbooks while you're doing this. If vapor that is not light and silvery begins to rise from your cauldron, you have made a mistake, and I would advise you to back away.
"You may assist each other at your tables if you wish, but I'd like a sample from each student at the end of class. I would also like each student to compose a short piece on how they went about brewing this potion and what went wrong and right in the process for homework. You may begin."
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