Jackson MacKenna
June 18, 2010 12:21 AM
Let's go on a tour! 3&4 years! by Jackson MacKenna
Jackson MacKenna smiled as students began to enter the classroom. Some were looking a bit tired but that was to expected until they got used to late nights. Jackson himself had always been a night owl so the ten o’clock time was no problem for him. He brushed back his blond hair and smiled as the students settled down into the various couches, and large arm chairs. He was anxious to get his first lesson started as he shifted back and forth. Once everyone was sitting Jackson clapped his hands and said. “Good evening students!” He said with a grin upon his face. “I am Professor Jackson MacKenna, you may call me Professor Jackson, Mackenna, Jack, or anything you would prefer.” He said with a smile. “Alright let’s do the roll call.” \r\n\r\nOnce the roll was taken he went and stood in the center of the classroom, students surrounded him. “I ask you all get a dictaquill or quoting quill as soon as possible as you will need it for my class. For now you may borrow one from me but I expect them back.” He said with a nod before pointing up at the charmed sky on his ceiling.“The sky holds so many wonders to us, stars, constellations, galaxies, planets and their moons. We will study the motions of the stars and planets through the heavens so we may always know where we are in the world. Some of you will take Divinations and Astronomy will help you through the class, others of you your jobs will demand knowledge of the night skies. We will also study other sky events. Now this ceiling is charmed to follow what the night sky looks like at any time of the year. You may come and study it during the daylight if you so wish, we’ll be using it on cloudy or too cold nights. ”
Jackson paused “Now tonight we are going to be a tour of the solar system. So if you’d please grab a mat and lay down so you can see the charmed sky!” He said and the students began to make their way to where the mats were. Once everyone was settled Jackson waved his wand. “We are going to skip over the Sun, I think we all know that one. So we’ll be starting with Mercury!” With that the sky zoomed in on Mercury, so much you could see the carters in it. “Now Mercury is the closets planet to the sun, and it’s also the smallest. Mercury can only be viewed in morning or evening twilight.” He took a moment for the students to write and made sure they got a good look at it.
“Moving on, we are going to Venus, it is the second from the sun. Venus reaches its maximum brightness shortly before sunrise or shortly after sunset, for which reason it is often called the Morning Star or the Evening Star.” He once again waited for them to get a good look at it. “Then comes us, the Earth.” He paused as the sky moved to show it. “It is the third planet from the Sun, the densest, it is the largest of the four terrestrial planets.”
The sky once again moved to show Mars. “This is Mars, the fourth planet from the sun. Mars can easily be seen from Earth with the naked eye.” He paused and nodded. “Now the four planets we just discussed are called terrestrial planets. By that I mean they are Earth-like.” He paused again and moved around the students lying down.
“Now moving on from our Terrestrial Planets, we head over to the Gas Giants, which are primarily made up of gases. The first gas planet we get to is Jupiter. This is the largest planet in our Solar System. When viewed from Earth it is usually the third brightest object in the night sky.” Jackson paused once again as the sky moved away. “Welcome to Saturn!” He cried looking at the ringed planet. “The thing that makes Saturn remarkable is the ring around it.”
“Just two more planets kids!” He said with a smile. “The next planet is Uranus, which was the first planet found with a telescope and is the fourth most massive planet in the Solar System. And finally we come to Neptune, the eight and farthest.” He clapped his hand loudly waking everyone who might have fallen asleep during his solar system tour. “Now I’m sure you guys can see where this is going! We are going to make models of the solar system. All the supplies you need are right over there! We will be using your models for most of the year so do a good job! If you need any help just call me over.”
Subthreads: But I've already got the T-shirt. by Alison Sinclair with Dmitry Talsky, Dmitry
Model By Numbers. by Marissa Stephenson with Daniel Nash II
Art class, excellent. by Edmond Carey
~Class Closed~ (nm) by Anonymous
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Jackson MacKenna
Let's go on a tour! 3&4 years!
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Jackson MacKenna
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Alison Sinclair
June 20, 2010 10:25 PM
But I've already got the T-shirt. by Alison Sinclair
She had pulled the occasional all-nighter with her girls in Chicago, with two in the morning on Saturday being a normal end point for a Friday night, but during the week, Alison's custom was to go to bed at eleven o'clock - no earlier, and no later. If she tried to do it any other way on a day that was not Friday, it threw her off for at least a day or two. This was a phenomenon those who knew her had learned not to encourage, since the resulting insomnia made her very, very irritable.In light of that, Alison knew taking Astronomy was a very, very dumb thing to do, but she hadn't been able to pass up a chance to learn something new. Greta had taught them all the basics of the planets and a little Astrology, but they had never really gone into depth with the topic proper. It would even be something her parents could begin to grasp a little of, which - if the current state of affairs kept on in good health and forced her to spend most or all of this summer in their company - would admittedly be kind of cool to see. Not cool enough to justify continuing the class if this MacKenna person didn't seriously deliver the awesome, but cool nonetheless.
She had a DictaQuill - a birthday gift from the Ballards as a whole last year - but decided to take notes with a normal one for now, just to see if she could after the professor's implication that it wasn't easily doable. Hearing that they were going to be lying on the floor almost convinced Alison to change her mind, but the thought hit her stubborn streak just the wrong way, and a few moments more made the problem irrelevant anyway. No point in taking notes over stuff that she already knew inside and out.
There were a few points she might not have thought of off the top of her head - Mercury being seen at twilight, the size of Uranus, and Jupiter being the third-brightest bit pretty much summed it up - but overall, she was sure just one more year of Muggle elementary school, an institution she'd left the summer after first grade, would've done to teach her as much even if Greta hadn't, which she had, so the whole thing was actually worse than any class she had repeated material in thus far. When she heard what their assignment was, she openly glared at the professor for a second before she remembered herself. They couldn't have done this, as he'd mentioned was possible with his special ceiling, during the day and not messed up her sleep schedule?
Sitting up, she looked at the supplies dubiously. One of the few things Greta had ever tried to teach her that she had struggled to learn was art. Arts and crafts, drawing and painting, sewing and embroidery - she lacked aptitude for them all. The odds were very much on that no matter how hard she tried, the thing she produced was going to look like it was made by the second grader she'd never been.
"So," she said quietly to the nearest people after checking that the professor wasn't close enough to hear her, "who else thinks new guy is weird for wanting us to spend all our gold on really fancy quills and pass up all the nice, accurate sky models for a crafts class?" She picked up a bit of a bluish substance that reminded her of the stuff she'd played with before she went to live with Aunt Lauren, what was it called...Ploo-gloo, Squishy Bread, Crayolas, no, those were crayons...Play-Doh. That was it. Did they even still make that stuff? She'd have to raid a toy store or something the next time she went back to Philly. It was to be expected that she'd be out of step with the current Muggle world, but not the one she'd known. "This class is so far not delivering on the awesome."
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Alison Sinclair
But I've already got the T-shirt.
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Marissa Stephenson
June 20, 2010 11:46 PM
Model By Numbers. by Marissa Stephenson
For Marissa, taking Astronomy had been a simple choice. She knew there was every chance she might be wrong, but it had all the hallmarks of a class that seldom, if ever, required her to do actual magic, which made it worth any amount of late nights. She needed such classes, not only as failsafes to ensure she got through each year (she had yet to flat-out fail anything, but there had been a few close calls in Charms, and it didn't pay to take that kind of chance), but also to remind herself that she wasn't necessarily doomed to a life of failure.The professor seemed pleasant enough, but she felt a brief surge of panic's slightly weaker cousin at the mention of needing dictation quills for the class. How was she supposed to get her hands on such a thing, when she had no way of leaving the school before summer and no relatives able to access the magical world, or even reliably work out the monetary system, without her there? Professor MacKenna was loaning them one for now, but that was a temporary solution.
She forced the feeling down firmly and made herself think. Mail-order catalogues. She had seen some students looking at them, and there had to be one somewhere on campus that could sell her a fancy pen. Her parents had navigated the complexities of magical banking to set her up a small account once they'd realized that nothing they thought of as money or a bank would be of any use to her for ten months out of the year, so she probably had the means for it. Yes, that would work. Crisis averted. She'd still rather have a secret society to help her out in such moments of her upbringing becoming inconvenient, but her brain would do for now if she could only remember to use it before the panic attack really got underway.
When they began the tour of the solar system - a useful review; she had covered the planets in elementary school, but that had been a long time ago, and while it all came back, she wasn't sure she could have reproduced it on demand before class - Marissa didn't completely lie back on her mat, propping herself up on her elbows and then the heels of her hands instead. She didn't feel comfortable lying completely flat on the floor like that, both because it just felt wrong and because she was afraid she'd fall asleep. The star simulation was very soothing, and combined with the rise and fall of the professor's voice to make her more relaxed than she was in her room. There, she would still be working on one spell or another for another hour or two or more, but here, it was easy just to drift off....
“Now I’m sure you guys can see where this is going!"
Her head snapped up a little painfully, brown hair falling over her face. She hadn't been asleep, but she had been close enough to start seeing dreams flashing in front of her eyes in addition to hearing what was going on in the room and feeling the strain on her neck and pressure on her hands. Odd feeling. Pushing her hair back into place and hoping no one noticed her blushing, she tried to make sense of what was being said, and how it should have been evident that basic information about a course should be an obvious segue into building a solar system model. She would have thought they'd be told to pick a planet and do research about it.
Of course, she was a read-write learner, at least according to her counselor, and, according to everyone she knew, very traditionally-minded, so it wouldn't surprise her if only a few others had joined her in thinking the class was going to go somewhere else. According to her cousin Morgan, who'd been sent to public schools all her life, the only thing to do in environments where most people operated differently was to go along with it. It wouldn't be so bad in this case. She had always had some knack for art, and while she preferred painting to sculpture - she had several ideas of what to paint once spring arrived and she could go out regularly, if she had time around her studies - she thought she could make an adequate model of the solar system for grading purposes and then use her book for the specifics. It had worked for filling out the frog-dissection lab reports.
Taking out paper and a normal pencil, she checked the table of contents in her book and found the section on the nine planets of her solar system. She was going to need to work out the scale before she could start; it wouldn't work if Pluto somehow ended up larger than Jupiter and all of its moons combined because she got overenthusiastic with the gray and let everyone else use up all the orangey-red. As she began jotting down the numbers she thought she'd need to calculate it, her elbow hit something hard. Wincing in pain, she looked up and discovered that it was a classmate, bringing her blush back in full force.
"I'm so sorry," she said, tucking her aching elbow back in as quickly as possible. "I should have been more careful. I didn't hit you in the head, did I?"
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Marissa Stephenson
Model By Numbers.
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Daniel Nash II
June 21, 2010 1:05 PM
I prefer acting to modeling. by Daniel Nash II
When he heard that Astronomy was being offered, Daniel had leaped on the opportunity. Not only was it the first and only class that his muggle background recognized as a real academic subject (not that he'd really been into school when he had been a normal muggle, but the familiarity was comforting now that he did identify himself as a scholar).For the first time ever at Sonora, he didn't feel like he was trying to play catch-up with the members of his class who grew up around this stuff. Having a two year head start on reading some text books that his sister would bring home during midterm and summer break had helped some, but not enough in his opinion.
Astronomy, he actually knew something about. It had played a large part of his fifth grade curriculum. Admittedly, fifth grade had been spent on set with his 'teacher' being a licensed professional tutor hired by the studio so most of his lessons and homework time had been squeezed between takes, during breaks, or while waiting for Dad to finish up so they could finally go home for the day, but he'd learned about the solar system before now.
And in significantly more depth than Professor MacKenna had offered so far. Sure, it wasn't a planet anymore, but the teacher didn't even give Pluto an honorable mention. Daniel was a little disappointed that the first lecture was so very basic. Perhaps it had been a good thing all of his other classes were so completely new.
On the other hand, maybe MacKenna was just a naturally patronizing person. He called them 'kids' and gave them a class assignment that Daniel could only describe as an 'art project'.
Daniel was not artsy.
He rolled over onto his stomach, dropped his forehead on his crossed arms, and groaned softly. The visuals that had been provided overhead had been fantastic, but this was not what he had signed up for. He could be in bed right now. Ten o'clock was his normal bedtime when he was at school. (At home, he stayed up later, depending on filming schedules and, obviously, the ten o'clock time slot was reserved for watching Street Beat on Thursdays, but he was also allowed to sleep later when he was home.)
He was disturbed from his sulk - ah, that is, er, his brief meditation on how he would create his model - by a sudden and painful jarring. He pushed up quickly, and rubbed at the side his head, and found the source of his injury in Marissa Stephenson's apologetic face. When he'd rolled over, he'd apparently moved too far into her personal space.
"Yeah, you did, but not hard enough," he said, still massaging his temple though it already didn't hurt as much as it had a moment ago. "I still remember we're supposed to be making models of the solar system." He grimaced, but it was more in response to the assignment than his fading head wound. "My tutor thought I was old enough to be spared that when I was ten."
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Daniel Nash II
I prefer acting to modeling.
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Daniel Nash II
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Dmitry Talsky
June 22, 2010 12:17 AM
Well I got the hat. by Dmitry Talsky
Dmitry was a night person; he thrived at night, when the stars were shining. The earth smelled different and you never knew what was right behind you at night. Ah yes the night was his time, and he enjoyed it. When he found out that Sonora had hired an Astronomy Professor he had become excited at the thought of taking Astronomy classes once again. At Durmstrang it had been the Russian’s favorite class, and there it was a mandatory class from first year until the seventh year. He entered the Astronomy class and smiled a bit glad to see the Professor had taken the time to make the room feel like the one at Durmstrang.He sat down on a plump couch and took out his textbook. Once the Professor had introduced himself and taken the roll he insisted everyone was to get a Dicta-quill. Didn’t everyone have one already, how else did they take notes? He shrugged and took out his quill as the Professor told them to go lay down on the floor. Really? On the floor were they toddlers? He sighed and made his way over to the floor he plopped down and sighed. He didn’t lay down he just propped himself on his elbows and looked up at the charmed sky, couldn’t this lesson have taken place in the day time?
Dmitry had thought this was to be a serious class but he soon learned that they were doing a first year lesson. He sighed and began to day dream about Charlie. She was an interesting girl; she was keeping him entertained in this place though a little more entertainment wouldn’t hurt. He sighed when the tour was over and the Professor set their assignment for the night. He groaned and sighed at the same time. Did they look ten years old?
"So who else thinks new guy is weird for wanting us to spend all our gold on really fancy quills and pass up all the nice, accurate sky models for a crafts class? This class is so far not delivering on the awesome.” A girl he had not met yet said softly to him and he scoffed and rolled his eyes. “Dicta-quills aren’t that expensive, but this by far the most ridiculous lesson ever.” He said in his thick Russian accent.
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Dmitry Talsky
Well I got the hat.
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Dmitry Talsky
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Marissa
June 23, 2010 4:16 PM
I can't say I have much experience with either. by Marissa
Marissa bit her lip when it turned out that she had, in fact, hit Daniel Nash in the head – something she hadn’t said entirely seriously in the first place, which made it all the worse that it was the case – but decided to take his preference for complaining about the assignment instead of getting angry about the bump as a form of apology acceptance. It was better than the alternative, in which she spent five minutes apologizing and still not learning anything about art or Astronomy for the entire class period. She didn’t object vehemently to the assignment, but the evening would have been far more satisfactory if there had at least been a requirement to improve her methods or develop a new skill.“I could try again, if you like,” she said, “but I’m told I don’t hit very hard even when I’m trying.” Tutor. That probably meant homeschooled, unless the word had a different meaning in the wizarding world. Of course, from what she’d read, there weren’t really magical primary schools, which was a shame considering the kinds of havoc the average Muggleborn child apparently wreaked in a classroom….”I’ve covered this before, too, though. My teacher gave us an option. You could present something like this, or you could present a paper. I picked the paper.” She looked down at the two-page spread of the solar system she supposed she would be basing her model off of and smiled. “I guess that’s a good thing – otherwise, I’d be tempted to have Mama send the one I made back then here, and then I’d have to see how bad something I thought I did well on then really was.”
She kept all of it put away in notebooks and hopefully weatherproof tubs, but Marissa seldom looked back on her older work, retaining it only from a mix of sentiment and the vague thought that she might one day need to reference something. On the occasions when she did pull something out from more than a few months past, she usually ended up regretting it. Her writing always seemed worse in hindsight, and while she knew that was a mark of how much she’d improved, it was still cringe-inducing to realize that she’d actually once been that bad - underdeveloped, really – and thought she was doing well. Maybe she had been, for her age at the time, but she’d never been the best at recognizing distinctions like that on more than a purely intellectual level.
That was the main way Sonora had been good to her, really. She was sure she was far better at research and composition than she could have ever hoped to have been by now if she’d stayed in the Muggle school system, because there, she could have gotten away with just being good enough. Here, going beyond that was necessary, at least until she figured out what the secret to magic was. There was one, she was sure of that, but she had yet to find it. Now wasn’t really the time to go looking, though, and a problem with what she had been working on had just occurred to her. “How large do you think these are supposed to be in total?” she asked Daniel. There was some questioning the taste of asking someone she’d just hit in the head for help, but he was older and an Aladren, which theoretically made him a good person to ask class-related questions. “I know I have a habit of always making things smaller than they’re supposed to be…”
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Marissa
I can't say I have much experience with either.
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Marissa
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Alison
June 23, 2010 4:36 PM
Find the trousers and shoes and we'll be in business. by Alison
Her year’s token foreigner scoffed at her, and Alison briefly entertained a fantasy about sticking the sharp end of her standard-issue quill into his eyes. Merlin, she was tired if she was thinking like that at the slighest cross. She'd seen the guy around enough to figure she largely had his number as an example of magical inbreeding gone wrong and therefore not someone worth getting annoyed over. Since he was half-agreeing with her, though, she decided not to entertain him with her thoughts on the matter.“Says someone whose parents can presumably grasp the currency exchange,” she said, still a little more coldly than usual. Her dad, she supposed she could excuse, but her mother had been through the getting-used-to-a-witch-in-the-family thing three or four decades ago. The chances that she’d need the information again after she and Aunt Lauren were no longer living under the same roof had been small, since the siblings of Muggleborns weren’t really that much more likely to have a magical child than anyone else, but Alison had seen her accurately report gossip from years earlier without hesitation. She should have at least figured out what was roughly equivalent to what by now.
She bit her tongue against adding a comment about people whose parents invested in cheap knockoffs that couldn’t spell and squeezed the blue…stuff into a ball, more to release trace amounts of tension than to attempt to make a model of the earth. Were they supposed to be putting weather patterns on this thing in addition to the continents? It would make sense, since the class was about stuff in the sky, but that was a lot of detail to go onto a smallish model in one class period. Unless they were all supposed to be like globes of the planets and moons in question instead of something smaller, but that would still take forever to reproduce really well even with magic to help. There was probably a spell, but it was also probably a spell handed down in secret from one generation of extraterrestrial globe makers to the next....
“My point stands, though, that professionals make these things better than we can. If we can’t make it look right, then what’s the point? Unless someone else knows a spell for replicating pictures in three dimensions on an outside substance…” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. "Ugh, ignore me. I'm griping. I get easily frustrated when I'm tired, and then I gripe pointlessly. That spell would be helpful, though."
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Alison
Find the trousers and shoes and we'll be in business.
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Alison
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Dmitry
June 25, 2010 9:17 PM
Don't forget the bag! by Dmitry
“Says someone whose parents can presumably grasp the currency exchange,” The girl said and Dmitry narrowed his eyes and frowned. Was this girl a mudblood? He bit his tongue as he began making the model of the sun. He should have sat away from the group so he didn’t get stuck in some nonsensical conversation. Yet now it was too late, the girl Alison he remembered finally after thinking about it for a while had already dragged him into the conversation. He sighed as he colored the stupid round ball with a orange and yellow mixed crayon.After a few moments it seemed that Alison wouldn’t be saying anything more Dmitry began to relax a bit. The less she talked the less likely he was going to go off on her, or worse hex her. The dark haired boy had hexed girls before and every time they had deserved it. He was just about to move onto his next planet when the girl spoke up again. “My point stands, though, that professionals make these things better than we can. If we can’t make it look right, then what’s the point? Unless someone else knows a spell for replicating pictures in three dimensions on an outside substance. Ugh, ignore me. I'm griping. I get easily frustrated when I'm tired, and then I gripe pointlessly. That spell would be helpful, though."
“I don’t think the point is make them look right, but more like that we understood the tour we just went.” Dmitry said with a roll of his eyes. “And if you’re so tired why would you take a night class?” He asked looking at the girl, trying to be nice but she was whining when he was trying to work.
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Dmitry
Don't forget the bag!
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Dmitry
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Alison
July 14, 2010 9:21 PM
Of course not. Anything else? by Alison
"To say I did," Alison responded to the question about why she was taking a night class. "I'm taking every other class here, so there was no reason to leave out just one. And if you were right about why we're making these, then we wouldn't be using them for the rest of the year."And she won at diplomacy forever. Not being able to back down from a confrontation, to just let sleeping dogs lie as her father might have put it, was an old problem; unless she was either ridiculously happy or, for some reason, insecure, she'd argue anything into the ground. That did her well in debate classes, but it had provided a persistent hangup in most social arenas, and she couldn't imagine it would do her much good when she eventually got a job, either.
Ah, well. What was the worst that could happen? Someone didn't like her. Other people had done so before, and would probably do so again. Everybody had people who just didn't like them, and most of them seemed to get through life pretty well. Hell, some of them were hugely successful, and the people who didn't like them were the ones having a hard time of it. If he talked to her again, she'd try to do better, but life would go on if he didn't.
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Alison
Of course not. Anything else?
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Alison
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Edmond Carey
July 22, 2010 7:23 PM
Art class, excellent. by Edmond Carey
Astronomy was a subject with applications to various branches of magic, and thus one that Edmond would, no doubt, have been expected to learn about sometime even without the understanding that a gentleman should know as much as possible about as many things as possible. The opportunity to study it in a structured environment now instead of on his own in a few years was not one Edmond had wanted to pass up. It amazing, really, to notice how easy it was to get off-track when he lacked a tutor to direct him in a given course of study; if his French grammar had improved even a hair less than it had between his thirteenth birthday and last summer, he thought Julia might have imploded from disappointment.He had promised, repeatedly, to do better this year, but wasn’t sure if it was a moot point now or not. Morgaine had made it clear that she didn’t have the time, the skill, or even the inclination to try to raise him herself, so he was to be spared another holiday in that – that monument to the inglorious dead that it pleased her to call a home, but he didn’t know if it meant he was going to be sent back to his home for the summer. If not, then what use was it to him to put in the work? Whoever his new mother figure was would most likely barely stop herself short of curtsying all the time and not have enough French of her own to correct his even if she’d had the nerve to.
And then there was the thought that he most wanted to avoid, but which Jane kept making him think of: what if it didn’t matter, if Robert and Julia agreed that things were different now and didn’t feel it was their place to tell him when he was acting a fool? The very idea depressed him more than he could articulate, making it hard to concentrate on the new professor’s lecture.
Perhaps it was because of that, despite his expectation of serious academic work with large figures to work, that he was not displeased with the assignment. He did not say so, because Julia would not have thought it was appropriate, but Edmond had always enjoyed art class, finding the times he spent with those tutors to be some of his favorites of all. He was not very original, not like Jane, and the only things he had ever made that weren’t exact reproductions of what was in front of him were bits of nonsense-jewelry for Jane to play in, foil necklaces and clay bracelets and the like, but he found working on art to be soothing. Jane said that it was much the same for her with mathematics, the pleasing balance of focus and detachment, but Edmond found he focused too hard on mathematics problems for that to be very effective.
That he already had a model of the solar system, an unusually extravagant birthday present from Robert and Julia after he’d written to tell them he was planning to take Astronomy, was not an issue. Grades were important, as was group experience, so he would make this one and then bring that one for actual work. Using such a thing while everyone else relied on crude, hand-made models might be seen as impolite, but he couldn’t help that. Those he worked with – and there was bound to be work in pairs; this was Sonora – were welcome to share, but his learning progress had to come before public opinion.
He looked over the available supplies as he used his wand to start forming the orbs that would be the planets. If there was time, perhaps he would make something for Jane. A peace offering of sorts.
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Edmond Carey
Art class, excellent.
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Edmond Carey
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