Professor Binns sighed at the work before him.
Scrolls after scrolls of history projects, a lot of them being done the night before.
He knew what his pupils thought of him and his colleagues weren't any better.
Perhaps he wasn't the most lively of teachers, even when he was still living, but he enjoyed his subject and was disappointed every year of the blase attitude his pupils showed.
Didn't they understand the importance of history?
Was it really necessary to repeat the mistakes from the past?
The war with Voldemort could have been avoided had anybody really learned anything after the Grindelwald war.
For that reason he had created this third year project, when they were old enough to understand the implications and still young enough to be malleable into going against it when they saw it happening again.
The ghost didn't believe in the ways the dead Headmaster Dumbledore had worked, forming his tools into perfectly what he needed of them, he just wanted everybody to think a bit more for themselves.
For years he was looking for the few pupils that really understood what this was about, who understood the beauty and the power of this subject but they were few and far between.
There, the next project about one of the golden trio, with phrases he recognized out of other projects to the same person and a horrific orthography befitting a 7 year old.
That was a T, most definitely.
Perhaps this way the boy would learn something.
Next project was...
Oh, that was interesting. Somebody had done a lot of work, the poject was in book format, bound in gray leather. And it wasn't just in that format, it was as thick as a normal book.
The ghost felt that this would be different than the others he had to mark.
"The Gray Between – Severus Snape"
If that wasn't an ambitious topic then Binns didn't know any other.
"Third Year History Project by Albus Severus Potter, Slytherin"
At first he leafed to the end for the formal check of a work like this.
A detailed appendix with every source he quoted or took information out, sorted and numbered.
An explanation that the Arithmancy calculations were done by the portrait of Headmistress LeCroix and any personal Information was compiled with the help of the portrait of Headmaster Snape.
He skimmed the first few pages and saw then the calculations of Madam LeCroix.
Different scenarios and possibilities of the war and its progression depending on Snape's side of the war and his level of involvement.
Knowing the brilliance of Madam LeCroix in her field the ghost decided to feel relieved that Severus was really on their side and didn't really spy for Voldemort. Somebody with his capabilities and enough ambition for personal power (something Severus was never really interested in) would have tipped the power disastrous to the other side.
For this project Binns needed time to completely read it.
And when he was through with it he needed to speak with his old friend Wenning-Thorne