Chapter 16:
First Day of School
Harry knew very little about the effectiveness of this worlds Trelawney as a teacher, but from what he could piece together from the negative comments about her he suspected his new students would have some catching up to do. But how to determine their skill levels? Pop quiz? Start of term competency check?
Pffft! Yeah right!
But knowing what he wasn't going to do only went so far to help him decide on his course of action. One would think Harry would have spent a considerable amount of time planning for his first class. One would be wrong. Problems like these were most easily and efficiently solved by having a simple conversation.
And so, he relaxed into his day and slept in until after the first round of classes began before heading down to the great hall. He took all of the main hallways down to breakfast, eschewing all secret passages and shortcuts to ensure as much exposure as possible. This way, the maximum number of students and faculty had the chance to pass him in the halls, as he explored the castle. He needed people to get the impression that there was something here for him to learn. But he was also making room so that if the fates decided to throw a fast ball out of left field with a random encounter, it could do so.
He somehow managed to make it all the way to the staff table without any incident beyond a shy wave from the random student. Not even a run-in with Peeves. How disappointing.
The great hall was mostly empty, save for groups of fifth through seventh years forming study groups at the different tables. The primary classes (charms, transfiguration, defense, etc) taught first through fourth years in the mornings, and electives met in the afternoons and evenings. This was mostly to allow older students the extra sleep they needed, but also because post-OWL students could drop classes they wouldn't need for their career choices or simply didn't pass with a high enough OWL to continue in. This freed up time for their areas of interest.
"Good morning mister Morrigan." Rebecca Pomphrey greeted.
She was one of only six people at the table that late in the morning. Just her, Sinistra, and three people he hadn't met before. The other elective teachers. And oh hey! Hooch was here too.
"Professor Maven, Hannigan and Grey, I presume." Harry greeted the two men and woman.
Emma Grey was a positively ancient witch, likely a former head of Saint Mungo's based on the sheer power of her healing aura. Most people earned a sort of "stench" to their magic as they aged depending on the types of magic they used most frequently. For most, this stench was like a recipe with many different ingredients forming a dish that was a mixture of charms, transfiguration and curses. And if you focus on just one type of magic over all others? Then it was like pure garlic, or lavender or lemongrass. With some people their affinity for the one type of magic they used was so strong that he couldn't not feel it. The only person he knew with an aura so attuned to a particular field of magic was Filius, who truly was a charms master. Most healers had such an aura.
She made no indication that she was aware of her surroundings whatsoever, so he let her be.
"I hoped you might find these handy." Said Maven, a brown-haired man with a receding hairline to rival Arthur Weasley and glasses thick enough to do the same with Myrtle.
He produced from his robes a pack of papers which he passed down the table.
"It details what level of arithmancy and runes my students are at, for wherever such topics crossover with your subject in class." He explained. "Sinistra added a few of the same for astronomy, which I know has much more to do with divination than arithmancy does, but still."
And like that he had most of the information he needed! Sans the pop quiz or hair-pulling. Thank you Moirai!
"I doubt very much that there will be much crossover between our classes." Said James Hannigan, a silver fox with black, peppered hair. "But I hope we can get along as colleagues."
Harry nodded then feigned curiosity and confusion as he turned to madam Hooch, she returned his gaze. Gold eyes meeting emerald ones.
"What subject do you teach, ma'am?" He asked. "Nobody mentioned you."
"That is likely because I am not a professor. My name is Rolanda Hooch. I am contracted by Hogwarts to manage the inter-house Quidditch league, any sporting clubs and to teach broom-riding, fitness, nutrition and safety. Among other miscellaneous tasks." She explained. "It doesn't keep me busy enough to really be a full-time employee, let alone a professor."
That was a lot more detailed job position than Harry would have imagined her having. He always just thought she taught first years how to ride brooms and refereed the Quidditch games.
"That is very close to being as important as professorship." Harry said honestly. "Why did nobody see fit to mention you?"
The woman shrugged.
"Did anybody mention the house-elves or Auror guards by name?" She asked rhetorically. "Or Argus?"
"Who?" Harry asked, the name barely ringing a bell.
"The lead caretaker." Explained Andrew. "He manages the house elves and maintains cleanliness and order in the school."
Oh! That's right. Filch had a first name, didn't he?
"Are there many sports clubs, Rolanda?" Harry asked.
"Mostly game clubs. Chess, gobbstones and the like. Most members are members of other clubs as well which makes my job of maintaining them easy enough." She explained. "Students keep trying to form a soccer, rugby and basketball league but the Quidditch teams already monopolize the stadium and we can't get funding to build courts for basketball or tennis."
Can't get funding, or can't get approved for funding? Harry resisted the urge to ask aloud the question which he already knew the answer to.
"What about HEMA sports?" Harry asked, remembering the hat's song. "Didn't Godric build places all over the grounds for fencing, boating and jousting?"
He didn't so much see the eyes of every NEWT and OWL student in the Gryffindor table turn their heads to look at him as he finished that sentence, but he did feel them. Come on Harry. Poker face time.
"Yes, and the facilities and supplies for such activities have been maintained, but they never leave storage." Hooch answered, oblivious to the attention from the students. "Except for the boats, which are used to transport first years to the castle for no other reason than to have some use for them now that the school doesn't hold mock naval battles or other boating events."
Holy shit, that sounded awesome! He couldn't wait for word of this previously little-known Hogwarts history to make the rounds through the student body. Hooch was going to have a busy time in the coming months.
"And how many students are required to form a club?" He asked, prompting the students within earshot to start taking notes on the conversation.
"A baker's dozen." She answered, only now noticing Andrew, James and Rebecca were laughing quietly at some joke she wasn't part of.
Even Emma was smirking slightly, although it was hard to tell from the mountains of sagging wrinkles which formed her adorable face.
"And students may be members of as many clubs as they wish?" He clarified.
"So long as they attend the minimum number of meetings, which can become difficult once they exceed two or three." Hooch explained.
Harry hummed to himself. Mentally patting himself on the back for being such a good Samaritan as to help Madam Hooch expand her working hours and maybe earn her way to qualifying as a Professor. He was just nice, that way.
"One last question before I head off to class. How do students apply to form a club anyways?" He asked.
"They can get an application from their heads of house. They fill it out, get it signed by the minimum number of students and confirmed by all four heads and the headmaster." She concluded.
"Got it!" He said, before standing up to leave.
"Welp!" Harry said more loudly than necessary. "I'm off to my first class. You guys caught all of that, right?"
He finished by pointing an accusatory finger to the different study groups near the staff table and got all the confirmation he needed. He didn't turn around to see the look of horror or anger on Rolinda's face as he left.
Boy did he ever wish he was a student again. This was going to be an interesting year.
His students were already waiting for him at the bottom of the ladder leading up to the divination classroom when he arrived. New teachers tended to have the effect of inspiring students to arrive early. Curiosity was a powerful motivator.
"Hello all!" He greeted as he pushed through the crowd to the wall directly behind the ladder.
He hip-checked the wall and it moved aside to reveal a stone staircase leading up to his classroom.
"Take the ladder or follow me up the stairs, I don't much care which." He commanded as he unlocked the trapdoor above them with a flick of his wand.
The 6th and 7th years split into two groups, one of which followed him up the stone steps and the other which took the ladder. When they arrived in his classroom their surprise at the change of decoration was evident on their faces.
Bright sunlight? Blue open curtains? Landscape paintings on the walls? Clean rugs covering the floor? Clearly, they were in the wrong classroom. these were surely the thoughts swirling in their heads.
But no. No they were not.
"Alright everybody! Pull up a piece of floor and we can get started." Harry instructed.
The students looked around nervously and a few were askance when they discovered there were no chairs or cushions on which to sit.
"You expect us to sit on the dirty floor?" Pansy demanded.
"No. I expect you to stand throughout my classes." Harry informed them. "And before you ask the "why", it is because standing improves blood flow, concentration and energy levels. You are here to learn, not to nap. That's what history class is for."
He got a few chuckles from the crack at Professor Binns but some of them still looked mutinous. So he elaborated further.
"You will notice that there is no chair behind my desk either." He said. "That is because sitting is terrible for your health overall. Some people say it's as bad for you as smoking, but that is a bit of an exaggeration. So stand or kneel, and live longer, healthier lives."
Interesting trivia tended to get children and teenagers to cooperate and so the ones in his classroom spread out until they were roughly equidistant from one another.
"Now. Roll call." He said then pointed to each student in turn and called their name without consulting the paper listing their names.
"Weasley, Patil, Patil, Zabini, Parkinson, Greengrass, Turpin, Brown, Malfoy, Abbot, Macmillan, Corner, Boot, Chang, Mclaggen aaaand." There were three students he didn't recognize.
He checked the roll. The first name he didn't recognize had a German name, but he tried his best.
"Veer-shcu-bleh-meh." Nailed it.
"Veirshunhenz." The young man corrected.
"That's what I said!" Harry said defensively. "Veer-to-the-left."
He studiously ignored the snickers from Mr Veirshunhenz's fellow Slytherins.
"Miss Calliope". he asked.
"H-here." Said a Ravenclaw redhead hiding behind Cho.
Timid little thing, that one.
"And finally, mister... Finnigan?" He said in surprise, discovering Seamus had a slightly older brother in this universe.
"Here." Said Sean Finnigan in an even thicker accent than his pyrotechnic brother.
Harry placed the student roll back onto his desk and addressed his class.
"Now. I'm going to turn around and write down my lesson plan on the board. Things that I believe are most important in a study of Divination. I will be very disappointed to discover my neck coated in spit balls after the fact." Harry informed the class and got a few chuckles. "Afterwards we will discuss which ones you have learned properly and which you haven't. I don't mean to disparage my predecessor, but I need to determine your skill levels and pop quizzes suck."
He turned around and wrote down a list of bullet points. Writing "Meditation Techniques" for the first one and "Ironic Predictions" for the second. Before he could continue onto the third his magical senses went haywire.
Reality was torn asunder as the laws of causality ceased to function for a split second and a hitherto nonexistent presence appeared in his classroom. If he wasn't already familiar with this exact type of magic or recognized the magical signature of this entity he would have spun around and fired a blasting curse at it. Since neither was the case he simply continued writing the bullet points and chastised the young girl.
"Miss Granger, while you and any other student not on my register roll are more than welcome to sit in on my class, I must ask that you use the door next time." He said before turning around.
He tried not to let his surprise at her appearance show on his face. He barely recognized the girl. It was hard to think of the brave, beautiful woman from his timeline as still having buckteeth, unkept hair and an un-made face. But here she was, with no effort put into her appearance. And he had thought Andrew's glasses were thick! He did recall she had never really bothered with makeup before the Yule ball and only after that did she wear it regularly when Lavendar and Parvati corrupted her. But her hair was never that bad.
The young woman was so shocked at being called out that she barely had the frame of mind to tuck the time turner back into her jumper. How she ever managed to keep that dangerous object a secret with such a terrible poker face baffled him. That she managed to do so for going on three years in this universe was a miracle.
"Er. Yes sir." Hermione managed to squeak out as she found a spot to stand between Padma and Parvati.
Harry barely avoided gagging at sir, but nodded at her before turning around and finishing the bullet points.
It was concerning to learn that his friend was stretching herself so thin by taking every single class (except, until now, divination). Almost as concerning as allowing a 13-16 year old girl own a time turner. Or at least it would be if the device weren't so inappropriately named.
The time turner did not, in fact, allow people to travel through time. As far as anybody knew such a thing was still impossible, despite the best efforts of Unspeakables. It actually used a really complicated, but interesting, workaround.
The same workaround that the resurrection stone used.
It worked by way of tapping into, what magical theorists called, The Ethereal Cuneiform. It was a concept which postulated(correctly) that the world around you, from the rocks, to the trees, to the water and air, remembered things. As if all of history was recorded upon it like etchings on a record disk. More unorthodox theorists might claim that reality itself, the fabric of spacetime and ambient magic, are also etched with memories. Music of tragedies and events long-forgotten carved into the greater consciousness of the universe. This more advanced theory was called the noosphere hypothesis.
The former is how ghosts and hauntings are formed. A terrible event can soak the earth with such raw emotion that the place replays that event into perpetuity until it is cleansed.
The resurrection stone worked on the latter principle, tapping into this "noosphere", this conglomerate of disembodied memories, emotions and knowledge in order to construct an artificial ghost of sorts. As with ghosts it is NOT the actual soul of the lost person. Worse, unlike ghosts it wasn't even an accurate representation of the deceased, but an imitation based on the faded memories that still-living people hold of them, or such memories that are bound to physical objects or places.
When all such people die or places lose their magic, what then does the resurrection stone have to use as a reference? Nothing, and so it creates a new wholly fictional person.
Experiments he and the Unspeakables did with the resurrection stone were put on hold once they figured this out, as the ethics of creating new self-aware sentients out of thin air were raised and none of them had the answer to it. And then the even more compelling ethical quandary of obliterating said entities each time the ring was removed led them to seal the object away. Permanently.
The time turner also worked on the noosphere hypothesis. How? By rewriting the memories within the noosphere. Effectively redefining past events by allowing the user to physically enter the noosphere and traverse it's memory like in a pensive. Difference with a pensive being, any energy put into the system affects the end result. Move an object within the noosphere memory and it effectively moves in real life.
It didn't break any laws of thermodynamics because no matter was being introduce or removed from the timeline, and energy was being conserved. You still exerted your own calories and magical energy with everything you did while traversing the noosphere. It's why time-turners were so exhausting to use. You also did not risk breaking causality, which was a nice touch.
What did all of this mean in lamens terms? It means the time turner does nothing more than create a shared hallucination between the participant and THE WORLD while allowing the user to experience more time subjectively. Or at least, this was the watered down version Hermione from his future had given him. He was sure the long version involved a lot of icky math and application of theoretical physics.
Higher magic is both weird and dangerous, and not for the faint of heart.
As for the resurrection stone, which they discovered was a twin to the mirror of Erised which also tapped into the noosphere, it meant that any information gleaned from shades brought back from it was unreliable at best and fictitious at worst. So, any anthropological or criminal investigative value it held was minimal, but still there. It would have been nice if the DMLE could simply resurrect murder victims and ask them who it was that killed them, unfortunately the biases of the investigators themselves changed the beliefs and knowledge of said shade before it even came into existence.
Just like the Mirror of Erised. Neither knowledge, nor truth.
"Let's start with he basics." Harry said as he turned back to the classroom. "Which meditation techniques have you learned so far in this class?"
His response was a sea of vacant looks, shrugging, and knowing smirks. Yup. That's about what he expected.
"Okay. What topics have you discussed?" He asked.
"Tea leaf reading." Offered Lisa Turpin.
"Dream recording and interpretation." Offered Ronald.
"We did a little palmistry." Said Blaise.
Harry sighed.
"That is all rather superficial, and little to do with applicable divination. Worse, all of those things can be taught together in a single semester, if that." Harry told them. "So what did you do the entire time in these classes?"
More shrugs and snickers.
"We mostly listened to Trelawney drone on about the great prophecy she had made and other constant self-aggrandizing." Hermione said distastefully.
Even the students who he knew were fond of the discipline begrudgingly agreed with that assessment. The more Harry learned about this universe's Trelawney the less he liked her. And he wasn't the biggest fan of the old bint in his own world.
"Very well. I guess we will have to go back to basics and build you guys up. But that's going to take some planning on my part so it'll have to wait for our next class together." He told that. "Which means this class will be entirely, ehem, academic."
They collectively groaned at that and they, as one, picked up their bags and retrieved their divination textbooks. Clearly they had misunderstood his meaning.
"No need for those!" He told them. "What I meant to say is, we will do an ask-and-answer session. Ask me anything at all - to do with divination, not my personal life thank you very much - and I will answer. Decide amongst yourselves what you want me to lecture on."
They perked up at this pronouncement and happily threw their bags back down before huddling together to whisper conspiratorially. Ah, inter-house unity. It's such a beautiful thing. He allowed them to debate amongst themselves as he added a few notes into his extremely rough course outline. It would be pretty atrocious if his sixth and seventh year students ended up receiving the same course work as his third year students, but it was looking like this would be the case.
He would have to find out a method for creating a more streamlined workload for the older students and at least get them through two or three years of work within the one year he had with them. So that they could pass his standards of what a divination OWL should be.
"Dousing rods." Verschen-whatever eventually demanded.
Harry looked up.
"Is that what you've all agreed on?" Harry clarified.
They mostly all nodded.
"Very well, before I discuss it, who would like to volunteer and explain what they already know, or think they know, about dousing." Harry asked.
Cho was the only one interested in the opportunity to earn some house points so Harry called on her hand.
"Holding two metal or wooden rods, a witch or wizard may use them as a sort of compass guiding them to whatever it is they seek." She cited. "The mechanisms by which they work is unknown."
"Two points to Ravenclaw." Harry awarded, only for Cho to look borderline offended at the insultingly low reward. "One for each point of that statement you got correct, out of five."
Harry flipped the chalk board over to the other side and wrote down each of the five points.
1 - Metal or wooden rods
2 - Compass analogy
3 - Wizard or witch
4 - Whatever they seek
5 - Mechanisms unknown
"Points one and two are correct. Points three through five are not." Harry Explained. "The use of dousing rods are not restricted to wizards and witches, the utility of seeking out things with them is highly limited and situation, and the mechanism by which they work is well documented and very simple."
The students rushed to dig out their note-taking equipment and jot down everything he said.
"On point number three, dousing is a technique of divining that, similar to EVERY other discipline within divination, anybody can learn and implement." Harry explained. "Even Muggles."
Zabini's hand shot up before the first syllable of the m-word left is mouth.
"Yes, mister Zabini?" Harry called on him.
"To clarify, when you say Muggles can use every technique within divination, are you exaggerating or can they really?" He asked in apparently genuine curiosity.
"Oh yes. Muggles, and even animals, dream don't you know? And just like all of us here every single Muggle has had one dream or another where they experienced an event that had yet to occur, or peered into the lives of people long deceased. Even if most don't remember it, which is one of the greatest values in having a dream journal. You would be shocked how magical Muggles really are."
Another hand, this time from Ron.
"Yes, mister Weasley?" Harry called on his best friend.
"Err, like what?" Ron asked hesitantly before adding "sir" as an afterthought.
Harry resisted the urge to cringe at being called sir by a student. He knew then and there he would never get used to the honorific so long as he taught his former classmates.
"Would you mind clarifying your question, please?"
"What kind of magic can Muggles do that would shock us?" He asked. "Not to get too off topic."
"Hmmm. I need to think of the best example." Harry stalled as he considered it, before the perfect one came to him. "I would have to say apparation."
"Muggles can apparate!?" Nearly half the class gushed out in unison.
"Muggles can apparate." Harry confirmed. "Almost always by accident and in times of extreme stress or else when unknowingly exposed to places of deep and ancient magic."
The students hung on his every word.
"Especially children, and usually with tragic ends. Every year hundreds of Muggles, children and adults alike, disappear without a trace." Harry explained. "They're sometimes found alive at impossible distances from where they vanished, or else... pieces of them are found. Most commonly in the wilderness, where the magic of nature hangs thick."
A few hisses of empathetic pain from his students later and he called on Calliope when he raised his hands.
"In other words muggles can sometimes tap into the ambient magic around them." He summarized.
"So... children go camping or hiking, hear a scary noise and splinch themselves?" The quiet girl clarified.
Harry nodded.
"And the pieces of them are carried off by the animals or elements. Or worse, they apparate ten meters down into the ground or into the middle of a tree or boulder. Instant death." He explained. "It's all very tragic."(AN-1)
Another hand from Draco.
"Last one on this topic then I'm getting back to dousing. Yes, mister Malfoy?" He called on his future friend.
"How and why are Muggles able to do magic at all?" He asked. "I thought the differentiation between Muggle and wizard was specifically that Muggles had no magic, not little magic like squibs."
This time Harry sucked in air through his teeth.
"That is a very complicated and highly debated topic. There are three main camps." Harry summarized. "The first is that external magic, traditionally classified as sorcery, in the form of ritualistic spells or just tapping into ambient energy is accessible to everyone and everything, which opens up a whole host of debates on the source of such magics. Demons? Gods? Other entities? It's a whole can of worms."
He went on.
"The second possibility is that Muggles inability to use magic is mostly developmental and partially psychological. Just like if you don't use muscles they remain weak, if you are not surrounded by and using magic you lose it. Muggle cities are built far away from natural sources of magic, and so their infants are not exposed to it as children, or more importantly while in the womb. Additionally, modern muggles do not even believe in magic. More accurately, they have a strong disbelief in it. It has been proven, in rather inhumane experiments, that you can convince a witch or wizard they are Muggles through the use of confundus or temporary memory charms, and they completely lose the ability to do magic, even accidentally. I personally don't buy either, the former because squibs, the latter because the implication that the whole of Muggle society could be transmuted into a wizarding society overnight with a single television cast is too scary to think about. But it does make sense. Ancient wizards convinced others only they could do magic, thus giving them a position of supreme power."
Which, if true, was a better explanation for the statute of secrecy than "Muggles are a threat" or "Muggles are annoying." If simply revealing magic to the world would increase the number of witches and wizards from the manageable hundred million or so to six billion and counting. Then no governing body could possibly manage such a large number of slaves, er, tax livestock, er, sovereign citizens. Yes. Sovereign citizens.
Many would claim that such anarchy would lead to a level of freedom, liberty and progression for the earth not seen since the Atlantean-Lemurian wars some twelve thousand years ago. It was the kind of pie-in-the-sky belief he'd expect from those gun-toting nutjobs Draco and Dudley went to the shooting range with. The kind of people who promoted civilian owned heavy artillery. Then again, Harry lived in a society where the average person had instant access to napalm, heavy ordinance and worse through a few swishes of a stick and yet they weren't living in a mad-max hellscape.
Harry was a bit skeptical of such romantic notions of what an ungoverned society would be like, and preferred to stay away from miniguns and bazookas, thank you very much. Either way, if he ever went down the insane supervillain route his first order of business would be a planetwide confundus to convince all muggles that they were wizards and watch the result.
"But onto point number four." Harry moved on before the conversation devolved any further. "You cannot use dousing rods to find just anything. They are specifically suited for discovering things that are buried beneath the ground and are either metallic or liquid. Which goes into point number five, why do they work?"
He gave the class ten whole seconds to see if any of them would offer a guess or hypothesis. A few were at least putting on a show of being deep in thought, but no hands flew into the air.
"Well, let's think about all of the pieces in this system. You have the human body, a generator which produces massive amounts of electromagnetic energy, grounded into the earth through your feet, a giant ball of molten magnetic nickel and iron. In your hands are two highly conductive rods of metal with a space of insulating air between them". He explained.
"And when passing over an underground stream of water, an insulator, whose friction with the highly insulated earth around it causes the conductive rods close in on each other ever so perceptibly. Or else when passing magnetically charged landmines, or buried treasure or gold veins. Are you starting to see how unmagical such a system is?" Harry finished.
It was amusing to see Hermione and Draco's faces light up at the explanation. Especially considering it was from listening to them drunkenly discuss this exact topic during an after party.
Celebrating with Ginny and Viktor after their teams trounced one-another in the 2006 Quidditch finals. Funnily enough it had been Draco who argued that the entire process was purely mundane and explained by electromagnetic principles. It was Hermione who believed that there was some element of magic to it, seeing as the system required a human mind directing the rods to find specific things. Magic is intent, after all.
Harry suspected it was a lot of column A and a bit of column B.
From there Harry let the class discuss the topics he had just lectured on between themselves as he stood back behind his desk refining his lesson plans.
And that was how the rest of their two hours together went. The students debating the mechanics of dousing rods, and other possible "magic" that could be wholly scientific, or the implications of Muggles being magical and not knowing it. A few astute students, like Blaise and Daphne, were off in their own little corner drafting an experiment to test the possibilities. Smart kids, all of them. A generation nearly wasted in war, and whose losses were a tragedy for the whole of wizardkind.
Soon the bell rang and Harry dismissed them.
"I will see you all next lesson and by then I'll have a proper class prepared for you." He informed them.
The students hesitated, but Hermione at least raised her hand and asked the question in all of their minds.
"What about homework?" She asked.
"Oh I won't be giving out homework." Harry said. "Ever."
The cheers of his students nearly shattered the sliding glass doors. Well, most of them. Cho, Daphne and Hermione were a bit offended.
Harry consoled them.
"A good friend of mine" - Hermione - " did some research into the effects of homework on subject retention." He explained. "Turns out, she wasn't the first as there have been hundreds of scientific studies in Muggle primary, secondary and post-secondary education all over the world on this exact topic. And guess what? Homework does not benefit student learning in any way. Worse, it seems to cause division in home life and further burns them out. Undue stress that I will not subject you to."
Skepticism reigned supreme upon his student's faces.
"I say your time outside of class is better spent researching things that interest you, and building friendships and romances with your peers that will last a lifetime and serve you much better than an essay on dousing rods." He explained. "Also, it's my job to teach you and I am given this slotted time to do so."
And if he can't teach them his subject in that slotted time, then he ought to be fired. Or so was his personal belief on this matter. He knew not to share such an idea with his students, or else fear repercussion when one of them inevitably mouthed off to another professor when they gave them an exorbitant amount of homework out of pure sadism.
"But, if you want the added workload I am happy to give out extra credit for a foot of writing on any of the debates you all had during this class. But I do genuinely believe your time would be better spent in the jousting club." He explained.
"There isn't a jousting club!" Ron corrected him angrily, before switching to excitement and curiosity. "Is there?!"
"There will be one soon." Harry said as ominously as he could manage.
Harry kept Hermione, Draco, Hannah and miss Cassiope behind as he made copies of his schedules.
"My classroom tends to be empty for more hours of the day than not." He told them. "As such, I have more free time to help study groups than most teachers. Here are the hours when students may come here for a quiet place to study, and I will happily help anybody in need with their homework or personal projects."
He handed them each a copy of flyers he had made detailing what he just said and the times of day his classroom and office were open to the public.
"I will be persona-non-grata on weekends, but if you would all be so kind as to pin these on your common-room notice boards, that would be greaaaaaaat." Harry requested.
They all agreed and made their way towards the exit.
"Miss Granger, stay." He said as he walked to the office.
"But, I'll be late to transfiguration!" She complained.
He waited for Draco, Hannah and Cassiope to vanish before responding cheekily.
"You and I both know you have no shortage of time to make it to any of your classes." He said knowingly as he disappeared into his private quarters.
One quick floo trip later and he returned from the Marchbanks residence with arms cradling an orange furball. The moment he re-entered the classroom Hermione melted into a fawning puddle at the sight of Crookshanks. Instant connection. That kind of thing happens when a witch meets her destined familiar.
"Oh, my goodness!" She squeaked as she held her hands out for the cat, which Harry happily passed over. "He's soooo handsome!"
It's true what they say, isn't it? About beauty being in the eye of the beholder? Only his bonded witch could find Crookshanks to be anything less than butt ugly, but seeing his clearly overworked and hyper-stressed friend light up was worth looking at the hideous feline.
"What's his name?" She asked cheerfully.
"Crookshanks. He is very old, but well-behaved. He is also yours." He said.
She paled at that.
"Mine?!" She said aghast. "I can't care for a pet. I'm barely getting enough sleep as it is!"
Harry smirked at his friend.
"He is not to be your pet. He is your familiar. I met him at the shop and knew I was meant to deliver him to you." He said, making jazz hands around his head and mounting "Psychic!" when she looked at him confusedly. "And he will not only be no trouble at all, but I argue he will be instrumental in helping relieve you of the stress you're going through by taking EVREY CLASS AT ONCE!"
She blushed profusely at that last part, burying her face into the purring ball of fur in her arms.
"Tell me, are you planning to also take all of the seventh year electives for your final year?" He asked.
"Just alchemy and magical theory, but I plan to drop History, ancient runes and arithmancy after this year." She said. "I think they'll let me test out and get my NEWTs for them early."
Harry nodded as he retrieved the transfer form, bill of sale and registration for Crookshanks.
"I filled out all of your information weeks ago. All you need to do is sign and he is legally yours." He told her as he splayed the documents on his desk.
She walked up to read them, still clutching Crookshanks for dear life, before her eyes widened comically at the sight of her home address, date of birth and other private information listed. She glanced at him suspiciously.
"Psychic!" He said dramatically, making jazz hands again.
She snorted at his antics but took the quill he offered all the same. With one flourish she took ownership of the part-kneazal and Harry folded the documents for her and stuffed them into her bag. So that she wouldn't have to let go of her new familiar, obviously.
He then pulled out his handy-dandy notebook and crossed off "Deliver Crookshanks to Hermione." It was right between "Have a conversation with the white house Hayes desk" and "Enchant an Adult-Sized Little Tyke Cozy Coupe to go 400 kph and taking it on the autobahn."
Contrary to popular belief, it was in fact possible to get a speeding ticket on that stretch of German road... but they'd have to catch you first!
As Hermione made to leave Harry opened the passage entrance for the stairway for her.
"And miss Granger." He called down after her.
She stopped and looked back up at him.
"Can I expect to see your name on my student roll next week?"
She absolutely blossomed into the brightest, buck-toothed grin Harry had ever seen.
"You can bet your life on it, Professor."
Harry smiled back at her before closing the entrance and returning to his desk. Only for her to return nanoseconds later through the trap door entrance, this time lacking Crookshanks and seemingly out of breath.
"Turn back from in front of the painting of Victoria falls." He instructed.
The girl went where he pointed, retrieved the time turner and turned back.
All in all, a good first day of class.
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