PTNS-101 Ideal wrokspace

That's a poker next to the cauldron. Scales are usually stored under the table on the right.

Granted, pets are not usually allowed in the place, but the cat just... demanded entrance.  There is also a barometer and thermometer beside the window.

CHRM-101 (#3) Wand Properties and Movements

Are there any limitations to the mending charm at all, other than its inability to fix magic? Could it be used as a medical spell?

Thank you so much for teaching the mending charm so early! I have a feeling I'm going to need it.

Isn't the unlocking charm kind of a useless measure? I mean, if you're teaching it to first-years, it's clearly kind of a basic spell. Wouldn't anything worth protecting be under counter-enchantments?

<->

3g. Practical Word Practice
Look at the following spells, and using what you have learned, please determine the intent of each spell. Have your teacher check your work.
      Stupefy
To stupefy is to 'make (someone) unable to think or feel properly'. So I would guess the effect at being some kind of stunning.
I remember this from the history books! It also halts moving objects.
      Spongify
This one I remember from DADA. It makes things rubbery.
Without that knowledge, I would assume it either made things spongy or turned them into sponges (the sea kind or the artificial kind).
      Finite
'finish', at a guess. 
As I recall from previous study, it is a spell to end other spell's effects.
      Fera Verto
I always learned it as 'Vera Verto'. Without knowing what it was, I couldn't have guessed the effects.

As it is, however, the etymology guesses would include 'verre' being the french word for glass. 

So, for the purposes of practicing these two spells, I've bought a few padlocks and grabbed a few toothpicks. 

*breaks a toothpick* 

Reparo!

Nothing. 

Reparo!

Nothing and a half, as the toothpick seems to knit, incompletely, back together. 

*breaks another toothpick* 

*focuses very hard on a whole toothpick* Reparo!

Nothing.

Reparo!

Nothing. 

Reparo!

Nothing. 

Reparo!

Nothing. 

*draws the spiral in the air a few times, to get the hang of it.*Reparo!

The toothpick turns into a very small twig. Well that was interesting. 

--

twenty minutes later, mostly gotten the hang of it.

*grabs a mangy paintbrush* 

Reparo!

The brush's bristles look a little better.

Hmm, I can see this being really useful!

*turns her room upside down looking for a broken necklace*

Reparo!

Some of the beads are in the wrong order, but wearable enough I suppose!

Okay, enough fun, on to lockpicking!

--

Fifteen minutes later, one lock is open, another one is melted, a third is plain old broken, and one's been broken into shards and cobbled back together, so that it looks more like a peice of abstract art than a padlock. Thank goodness I decided not to practice on my mother's doors.

ASTR-101 Mid-Term, Test 2 (Essay)

100%

Now for the big bit! Listed below are the four planets that we have so far studied, with an aspect written next to it. You need to research this aspect of the planet, and write 125 words on it. This means you will be writing 500 words in total. There is lots of information on each aspect on the Muggle interweb-y thing, so please use all resources available. Feel free to go back and read the prior lessons, but try and get new ideas.

Mercury - Surface Geology

Venus - Atmosphere and climate

Earth - Tectonic plates

Mars - Moons

Student Response

Count the words! Each section has exactly 125.

--

Seen from a telescope, Mercury looks a lot like our moon. It's also pretty pockmarked, probably due to being pelted by meteors all the time. Analysis of the planet's surface has determined that it almost surely has ice (water). As water is the base for most potions and has been determined to be necessary in order to anchor life, this is very interesting, as it would suggest the possibility of life on Mercury. Mars also has evidence of the same. The muggles have only speculated its existence, but wizarding astronomers confirm absolutely the presence of ice on the surface of Mercury.--

Venus is hot! No, I don't mean the goddess, although that does also fit... I mean the planet. Geez. As I've mentioned briefly in a previous essay, Venus has an average temperature of  460 degrees Celsius. That is four and a half times the boiling point of water. It is also consistently that temperature - unlike the earth, where surface temperature depends on season, region, time, and weather, among other things, Venus' surface is pretty consistent. This is partially because of its axial tilt, which is 3 degrees to our 23, but it is also because Venus' atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. CO2 traps heat, which prevents it from leaving the planet. Therefore, unlike the earth, where sun exposure only briefly warms the surface, on Venus it stays, making it toasty even at night. 

A note: There are gases on our planet, including CO2, that trap heat too, they just aren't as plentiful.

--

The crust of planet Earth is made up of plates that shift, slowly but noticeably, over time. For wizards, this caused some confusion and trouble, as some magic that relies on very accurate placement had a tendency to change unpredictably, even when factoring in the spin of the planet. In this case, the muggles beat us to the discovery in the mid-1900s - which makes it extremely recent. Until then, though our endeavours to study backwards in time gave us some idea that something was changing on the planet's surface over time (given that time travelers going more than a few thousand years at once had a strange, unexplained tendency of ending up in entirely the wrong places), it was attributed to 'quirks in the magic'.

--

The moons of Mars are named Phobos and Deimos, personifications of fear and terror- as the constant companions of the god of war, they make perfect sense, as they are his sons in Greek myth, or rather, the sons of Ares, his greek counterpart, as Mars is a Roman god. Their existence was predicted by wizards since the early twelfth century, but only confirmed once our modern spellwork on telescopes came in, circa 1694. Word leaked to a muggle author, Jonathan Swift, who dramatized it in his novel Gulliver's Travels, published 1726. George Bonaccord, a french wizard of some small renown, also published a short story in 1750 that mentioned them, under the alias Voltaire. For muggles, Asaph Hall discovered proof of both in August 1877.

CHRM-101 (#2) Spellcasting Basics

Is the visualization just one of many tools for concentrating on your magic or is it... how should I put this... real? The idea is, is it just a way to concentrate on your power or is it the only way? Are there others?

Does Levicorpus count a variant on the levitation charm? (Nevermind, it does, as stated in the textbook.) If none of the other spells work on people, why does it? And what was the magic used at the 422nd world cup, by the death eater forces there? It was certainly not only Levicorpus, as they had more control over the bodies than that.

<->

Professor, your lecture contradicts the book. I made a chart!

Spell Title	Lecture Incantation	Textbook Incantation
Levitation Charm	Wingardium Leviosa	Levioso
Hover Charm	Levioso ?	Wingardium Leviosa
Rocket Charm	?	Alarte Ascendare?
Floating Charm	?	?
Locomotor charm	?	Locomotor?

Edit: Oops, I mixed up my textbooks. Frankly, I think the book I read makes more sense than the other, but oh well...

 So, testing... Wingardium Leviosa! *points the wand at her phone* Well, that was pathetic. Maybe I would try it on something lighter. *quickly makes a paper aeroplane* Wingardium... Leviosa! I think it might have shuddered a bit! *tries again, with a wider sweep on the swish* Okay, it moved, but only because I sent a draft at it. *and again, closer to properly this time, with a very vigorous flick* *the aeroplane shoots across the room and embed itself half an inch into the wall*. Oh for crying out loud! 

...half an hour and about a hundred tries later, the room is littered with paper aeroplanes. 

*gathers them all in a pile* INCENDIO!

My wand

Wand Length: 10 3/4 inches (the length of my forearm, plus half an inch)
Wand Flexibility: Only the tiniest bit of yield
Wand Wood: Spruce
Wand Core: Thestral hair

I was wandering in the forest one day and came back to my mother to tell her I'd made an imaginary friend. Well, I said invisible, but she assumed that meant it only existed in my head. 

It was actually thestral colt. It eventually rejoined its group, but that was after the day I went to get my wand, at ten years old. The wandmaker, Jimmy Kiddell, recognized that I was covered in thestral hair. He made several wands out of it, and had me test them- the ash wand agreed with me best. Kiddell told me "The wood was a bit crooked, but it just seemed to feel right". There is a slight corkscrewing to the shape of the wand. I usually keep my wand tucked into a strap in my left wrist, point towards my elbow. The wand itself also contains, embedded semi-naturally (well, okay, deliberately by Kidell) near the base, a small Mookaite stone. 

I keep my wand slipped into some elastic straps on my left arm. I seem to be the only one to notice this, but my wand tends to feel warm in my hand- everyone else tells me it feels icy, which is strange, since I store it close to my body.

My wand tends to work best at pranks and creative new spells- not so great at serious spellwork that requires precision. Or maybe I'm just blaming it for my own failures...

I've been reading some books....

Interpretor is a gorgeous charm! It translates writing. I've the translation section of this blog after it.

(This, by the way, is totally made up, by me.)

HERB-101 Lesson 4

But that would only take up one plant, and training a dog to follow you takes years? Isn't that almost as inefficient as it is inhumane? Why not simply place a bird in a cage near the mandrake and then pull it up by magic from a safe distance? 

What makes Devil's Snare a magical plant? It just grows really quickly as far as I can tell. There are non-magical plants that do that. There are also non-magical carnivorous plants. Why hide its existence from muggles? They've seen weirder. And no sane muggle would approach it if they knew what it was.

Homework

A rather complicated query on the mandrake: If the scream of the mandrake can only cause one death, would it not most often kill flies, worms, or bacteria? Now, a possible answer is that the range of hearing of a fly is different, but then, so is a dog's range. Perhaps it is the complexity of the creature, or its intelligence. Also, the screams of a juvenile mandrake are known to only stun- is there a limit to the number of creatures it can do that to, and if not, then why would it have evolved the greater-powered one? Also, a mandrake only starts screaming if its mouth is out of the soil. Would that not leave it vulnerable to animals that burrow? Perhaps it simply kicks them. 

Also, having some knowledge of a normal plant's anatomy, I know that the mandrake is clearly not made the same way most plants are. Plants don't have muscles - in fact, they have rigid cell walls. On the assumption that the mandrake is in fact a plant and not an animal, you could consider it a very advanced form of the same things that allow carnivorous plants to move, but unlike, for example, devil's snare, a mandrake is not growing to cover things. Granted, perhaps it is a magical process, but surely we should study the process that animates them.

In class, you showed us infant mandrakes- how large to they become when fully grown? They seemed approximately human size as babies, are they six feet long underground as adults?

Now the most obvious protective necessity for a mandrake is earmuffs. They do also bite, so good protective gloves are probably needed as well. 

CHRM-101 Lesson One!

When was the memory charm (obliviate) invented? Is it possible that the memory charm fails when it comes to the subconscious, as natural amnesia sometimes does?  

While some muggle knowledge of the wizarding world is clearly passed through story from other muggles, has the origin of those stories ever been traced to people who have had said charm performed on them, or has been slips of the tongue by wizards?

Voltaire was a pseudonym for a wizard, are there any others like him? How much has that affected muggle knowledge?

Does the ISSS cover information? If so, what about those wizards that marry muggles?

I wonder if Lumos can be controlled to make different colours…. I’ve found that since I prefer blue to yellow, if I concentrate very hard on that sometimes my lumos charm seems to spark… am I just doing it wrong? Hold on…

Holy… Ohkay, I’m sure there are other wizards that have discovered this before, but ‘lumos azul’ produces a blue light… although I can’t get it to stay for more than a minute before going out.

An intro to this...

Basically, I'm going to Hogwarts! Hogwarts is Here is a website by fans for fans... but basically it's an opportunity for me to go to the school I've been waiting to attend since I was eight!

Here you'll find course notes, questions I'd ask during class, and the results of my practice.... most of what I will say here won't be canon to the books and may not even be canon to the website... but I shouldn't ever totally contradict book canon.

Something you'll need to know.... a little chibi of me waving my hand means that I'd be asking these questions in class- me holding a wand is me practicing. Anything else should be explained as I go. if you want to know what I'm on about, join the site!