CHAPTER THREE: what the actual heck is muggle studies?

I read through the scrolls of past Muggle Studies syllabi with increasing dismay. It was all STEM stuff—electricity, indoor plumbing, cars, powered flight. A lot of it was also wildly inaccurate. "There's no way this is going to work," I muttered.

I was holed up in a corner of the gorgeous, magical library. Books were floating through the air in a way that was somehow both dreamy and businesslike, as books tend to do. The library was almost empty, except for a girl around twelve with bushy brown hair sitting at the window, surrounded by stacks of books that were even taller than mine. I wondered if she was one of my students.

I glanced down again at the syllabi, which was open to a quiz on "Bathtime customs of Muggles." I needed a totally different approach.

The meeting with Dumbledore had not gone well. McGonagall had not been present after all. I had intended to be diplomatic, but as soon as he said "well, Miss Fairforest, I trust you've had a pleasant surprise?" I lost my temper.

"Are you out of your goddamn mind?" I said. "What in the everloving blazes of glory were you thinking?"

He smiled over his half-moon spectacles. "Your attitude, is, of course, understandable. But you must understand the difficulties of my position."

"Difficulties my ass," I said. "You blatantly mislead me about the nature of this position."

He steepled his fingers. "You are, of course, welcome to decline."

"Yes, now that I've uprooted my whole life and flown halfway across the world to get here," I said.

He gave an elegant shrug. "Such are the risks inherent in accepting a teaching position in a foreign country." He began fiddling with one of the many golden instruments on his desk. "Doctor Fairforest, let us understand one another. This position is one which I believe you are uniquely qualified to fulfill. After all, we are defined not by our abilities, but by the use we make of them. Perhaps you are even destined to be here."

The bastard sounded so sincere that I almost believed him. But he also had the confident gleam of someone who knew he held most of the cards. I could walk away, sure. And go where? My study abroad friends had long forgotten me.

"I'll stay out the year," I said. "But we are renegotiating the contract."

Normally, I wouldn't be brave enough to do any of this, but my anger carried me through. He did agree to give me a larger salary, and gave me a reasonable budget for teaching materials, like a printer, and a few computers for the students to use. He warned me they would have to be guarded zealously, since enchanted technology has an unfortunate tendency to become sentient. But I wasn't about to grade handwritten scrolls of parchment. One can take the wizardly aesthetic too far.

Still, I could feel in my gut that something wasn't right. I wasn't sure what it was, exactly. Maybe just the fact that the man had gotten what he wanted after all.

I had stalked off to the library in an effort to regain my temper. Now, I pulled out my laptop and began typing. I needed to think of it like a study abroad course, like you were preparing to go into a foreign country. My mind circled back to the printer. Maybe muggle communication methods would be a good place to start.

I was about halfway through a decent working lesson plan when I heard a sharp hiss of breath behind me. I looked up to see the librarian (she was, unmistakably, the librarian) standing with her hands on her hips, looking as if she was about to have a conniption fit.

"What," she demanded, "is that doing in my library?"

I looked down at my laptop. "Just getting in some lesson planning," I said cheerfully.

She exploded like a 2 liter diet coke filled with mentos. "I do not allow muggle technology in my library! How dare you bring that—philistine abomination here?"

I just kind of let the question hang there in silence for a bit, since I was really at a loss for how to respond. I looked down at my laptop, and out at the window. You could see all the way down to the lake, where the giant squid was battling a flock of grindylows. Across the way, I saw the girl with the book watching us surreptitiously over the top of Wonderings With Werewolves by Gilderoy Lockhart.

Eventually I said, "So I guess this would be a bad time to talk to you about the muggle books I want to order for the library?"

"Muggle Books. In my library?" she repeated.

"I find," I said, "that one of the best ways to learn about another culture is to study its literature."

She gestured to the massive library. "We have the finest collection of wizarding literature in the world. From Ancient legends to modern history, from the purest light magic to the darkest dark magic. All muggle literature is hopelessly limited by their blindness to magic. The best of it is simply cheap derivatives of the wizards' true understanding of the world."

This time I really was rendered speechless. "Be that as it may," I said. "I will be ordering muggle books."

"Get out of my library," she said.

I packed up my laptop and got ready to leave, hoping she didn't notice that my hands were shaking. "I expected better from you," I said, as I slung my bag over my shoulder.

I went back to my office, cursing freely as I went. Fortunately the students appeared to be elsewhere. When I arrived, McGonagall was there waiting for me.

"What happened?" she asked. "Is Severus giving you trouble?"

I tried to be diplomatic as I explained what had happened.

She looked fierce. "Write me out a list of everything you need, and I'll make certain you get it." She looked around the office. "Perhaps you could use this room as a sort of auxiliary library for the students."

I smiled. "I'd like that." The office had two good-sized windows, and plenty of desk was in the middle of the room, which made me feel rather naked and unprotected, but I suppose it gave the impression of authority.

"I came to show you how to work the projector," she said, getting up, looking brisk and businesslike once more.

My classroom was next door—it was very spare and simple, but it had a lovely old-fashioned blackboard that one could turn either way. The projector in question looked like a nineteenth century magic lantern had formed an unholy alliance with a biblically accurate angel. Like normal projectors, one needed to perform a complex ritual of pushing buttons, pulling levers, coaxing and cursing before it would work, but the images were miraculously vivid, almost eerily real. There were several large boxes filled with painted-glass slides, most of which were surprisingly up to date. There's nothing quite so strange as an image of a macbook viewed through such a contraption. As fascinating as it was, I added a more up-to-date projector to my list of needed materials.

I felt a little sick as I looked out at the classroom, imagining it filled with students, as it would be tomorrow, remembering the whispers in the dining hall. What would they think? What if they were all like the librarian?

"I remember my first day teaching at Hogwarts," said McGonagall, looking out ruefully over the projector. "I was so nervous that I accidentally transfigured one of the students' knapsacks into a bagpipe. It was so loud that you could hear it in the next village over. They had to evacuate the school."

"Really?" I asked.

She smiled. "Oh, aye."

"What did you do?"

She shrugged. "Well, I decided that the next day was bound to be better than that."

"Was it?" I asked.

She wrinkled up her forehead, trying to remember. "Come to think of it, that was the day that—well, no, it wasn't better." She sighed. "It takes time to get your feet under you. But you will."

I nodded. To be honest, I felt only mildly comforted, but I was thankful for her honesty.

And so, the next day, I found myself face to face with about thirty thirteen-year-old wizards, armed with my handwritten notes and an ancient projector. Students attended class with their house, which was new to me, so today I had the Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs. Role call itself was fascinating. The students all had the most marvelous names—Bertilak Bloomhouse, Lavender Brown, Theseus Blythe, Carissa Craven, Kevin Entwhistle, Hermione Granger [we're just assuming that electives start second year]. The last was the girl I'd seen in the library.

I introduced myself, and started out with an icebreaker question—what's your favorite snack or sweet? Most of them I'd never heard of before, like Drooble's Best Blowing Gum, sugar quills, chocolate frogs, and Bertie Botts' Every Flavor Beans.

"I'm going to level with you," I said. "I learned that wizards exist exactly two days ago. So, in this class, we're going to learn from each other," I said. "I'll be teaching you about the muggle world, but you'll be teaching me about the wizarding world too. Now, whenever you're learning about people whose lives are different from yours, the three things you need to be are curious, humble, and kind."

I did a poll—by show of hands, of who had grown up in the muggle world or was familiar with it. About a third raised their hands. Then I asked them why they had chosen this course.

"I thought," said Hermione, sounding disappointed "that I'd learn about Muggles from a wizarding perspective.

"It seemed like a soft option," said Seamus Finnegan.

"I want to work in the Ministry of Magic," said Lavender.

"Fair enough," I said, sitting down on the edge of the desk. "You know, Hermoine makes a good point. Sometimes it's hard to understand what something is like when you're living in the middle of it. You need the benefit of someone else's perspective. So both you and I are going to think a lot about what it means to be a wizard and what it means to be a muggle, and try to get outside our own perspectives. And I'm sorry, Ernie, but it's not going to be a soft option. The questions we're going to be thinking about are huge questions that people have spent thousands of years trying to figure out. What is magic? What does it mean to be a human? Especially in a world where you've got other sentient creatures?" I had to pause for a moment and resist the urge to go into an existential crisis over the last question. "What do you do when you don't fit in? And how do you treat people whose lives are totally different from yours?"

I paused to let all this sink in. Hermoine looked mollified. "So I find, when I'm dealing with big ideas, one of the best ways to understand them is through stories. So what we're going to do for the rest of the class is I'm going to have you tell me a story. Take about fifteen minutes, and write down exactly what a day is like in your life, and every time you use magic. You can write about a day at school or a day at home. And then I'm going to ask a few people to share what they wrote."

There was a rustling of paper and ink and quills and parchment. I have to say, I had mad respect for these kids who'd grown up doing homework assignments with a quill pen. I glanced over my notes about a day in my life, and looked out at my students, silently drilling myself on their names. Some started writing right away. Some were definitely chewing on sugar quills. I did the Scary Supervision Walk in my loudest high heels, and looked out the windows at the drizzling rain. Dreich. That was the Scottish word for it.

When fifteen minutes had passed, I called them back together. "It's okay if you didn't get to everything," I said. "Now, who wants to share?"

Lavender Brown went first. She talked about feeding her pet rabbit Binky (apparently it was a normal rabbit), and sending owls to her friends over breakfast, which was usually Irenaeus' Self-cooking Porridge. Her mother cast a cleaning spell on the dishes (I was envious). Her chores included working in the garden and chasing off Blast-Ended Skrewts. A lot of wizards, I learned, lived out in the countryside or in small wizarding villages like Hogsmeade and did some farming. The Brown's extensive garden specialized in magical crops like Dirigible Plums ("Mum says they taste kind of like persimmons") and Sugar Shrubs, as well as herbs used by wizards and muggles alike, like lavender. It required a great deal of magic to create the optimal conditions to grow lavender in England's damp climate.

Some, like Kevin Entwhistle's family, preferred the anonymity of city life. He helped run his father's record store in London, so they had to hide their wizard status, but still used quiet spells like the Theft Prevention charm and repairing spells on old records, and made trips to Diagon Alley for wizarding groceries. I asked him to tell me about popular wizarding musicians. "I really like the Weird Sisters," he said, with murmurs of enthusiastic assent from the class.

I made a mental note to have a Muggle Music Day with different kinds of music, like Pat Conroy, and determined to find myself a record player and a boom box.

Hermoine talked about growing up in suburbia with dentists. She had a good sense of detail, and to my surprise, the class listened with rapt attention as she talked about how you couldn't just fix your teeth with magic, it took a lot of time and effort, and about microwaves and public schools.

For homework, I assigned them the first two chapters of E.L. Koningsburg's The View From Saturday. It was a bit dated, but I thought it would give them a good glimpse of what Muggle life was like for children around their age who still felt a bit out of place. "I want all of you to write down a question about one muggle thing in the book, and we'll talk about them on Thursday."

They filed out, chatting excitedly.

The Ravenclaws and the Slytherins were a bit more of a challenge due to the fact that their teaching needs ran in opposing directions. The Ravenclaws had so many questions. So many. They wanted to know about everything, and were so excited to tackle the big questions. There were a few very vocal deeply prejudiced Slytherins who didn't see why this class would be of any value, and they did their best to bully the more curious, open-minded Slytherins into submission. I told them they could drop the class if they liked, but that being close-minded would severely handicap their progress at school and in life. "I'm not asking you to change your whole outlook," I said. "But if you want to succeed in this class, you will have to listen and learn to think about why you believe what you believe. That goes for all of you."

To my surprise, several students followed me back to my office, peppering me with more questions about everything from animal crackers to zeppelins. Some of them were the quieter Slytherins from before. A lot of the questions required internet answers, so I demonstrated how to use the computer (with many, many cautions against using magic anywhere near it).

I was used to intensely apathetic undergrads, so at first I was kind of overwhelmed. But I made a big pot of tea for everyone, and in the midst of it, I thought this is actually amazing. What I was doing mattered.

The rest of the week was kind of a blur of different variations of the same class. The questions get harder as the kids get older, but there was the same sense of excitement and curiosity. When I wasn't teaching, I was prepping, grading, reading everything I could get my hands on about the wizarding world, and exploring the castle, inside and out. I really needed to go to the village to pick up supplies, but I couldn't make it until the weekend. I also sat in on McGonagall's Transfiguration class (terrifying and awe inspiring, honestly), and Professor Binns' History of Magic class. All of the students found it horribly dull but I took lots of notes, once I got used to a ghost lecturing us on the intricacies of the Third Goblin War. To my surprise, all of the professors agreed to let me sit in on their classes, even Snape.

Sitting in on Snape's class, however, nearly cost me my job.

Next chapter: Snape's class nearly gets her fired, Hogsmeade interlude, "well at least Lockhart's class won't be as weird" Lockhart flirts with her violently and its wildly uncomfy. Drinks at the Three Broomsticks. Sees snake on the third corridor.

Does Hogwarts have wifi?

Madam Pomfrey brings her a houseplant.

Village of Hogsmeade

McGonagall assigns her to a house.

Her quarters

How does she get messages around?

Dumbledore's bedroom comes up again later. Possibly all the bedrooms—they have to go on a clue hunt of some kind.

Has an

At one point she goes down to the great hall to lay out and look at the stars and runs into Lupin.

At one point she tries to make fried chicken—either they ride into a neighboring village that supposedly has a KFC or there is an intense dispute with the house elves.

Later: