The Living Classroom

I sighed, closed out the document, and shut down my laptop. Classes started tomorrow and I wanted to make sure there were no typos, wrong due dates, and anything else of that nature in my syllabus. Students were merciless when they found errors. Also extremely annoying and I sure as hell didn’t want to start off the semester that way. Again.

Hopefully, the wild stories that had popped up after last spring’s class would keep this year’s students in line. It wasn’t planned, but I had to grin as I remembered the looks on the students’ faces as the classroom came alive with each lesson. Literally. The dean had informed me that this had been an unfortunate side-effect of the room I had been assigned, but I had thought it made for a few insanely good “teachable moments.”

I mean seriously, how often does one get to witness the signing of the Constitution live? Or be in the Oval Office when Nixon resigned? Okay, so some of the students freaked out a bit… a lot… ran screaming from the room. But we’re a magic academy! What did they expect? Well, my classes weren’t supposed to have any magic, they were general ed classes and considered by many to be boring as hell, even though the why’s and hows of creating law about magic and its uses should be important for practitioners. You’d think.

After those fiascos, the dean told me that the room must have had some leftover magical residue from a previous class and offered to give me a different room this semester. I told him no, I’d work around any leftover magic.

“You sure? I heard it got a bit, um, intense last year,” he said.

“True. But I spoke with Blake Abernathy in the Applied Magic department and now I know what triggered those, uh, episodes,” I replied. “I’m just lucky it didn’t happen while we were discussing the 1968 Democratic Convention riots in Chicago!”

The dean rolled his eyes so hard they almost fell out of his head. “Please. I’m too young to have a heart attack,” he said.

I laughed. “Fair enough. I promise, no more scary moments coming to life.”

He gave me a sideways look and frowned. “That doesn’t sound complete, but I guess I’ll have to accept it.”

“Plausible deniability, boss!” I grinned at him and left the office.

Back in my own office, I checked over the syllabus one last time. No, there wouldn’t be any recreations of the Whiskey Rebellion or anything like that.

But Congressional hearings when passing the first laws affecting the use of magic enacted after magic reappeared? That I could and would do. Everybody warns against watching laws and sausages getting made but it’s extremely edifying when you do watch. Mildly horrifying and somewhat disgusting, yes. But edifying and enlightening. And my students would be edified and enlightened this semester.

******

Fiona Grey prompted me with: The classroom came alive with each lesson…unfortunately. This immediately took me back to my days as a faculty in the political science department. It sure would have made teaching really fun if I could have made topics literally come to life! My prompt went to ‘nother Mike. You can mosey on over to More Odds Than Ends to see what he came up with and check out everybody else’s responses.