Professor Dawson awoke from her troubled sleep. She sat up, pulling her
blanket around her, and gazed out the window as she tried to recall the fading
dream that had disturbed her. It was still dark. The Hogwarts grounds seemed to
be blanketed by blackness. She shivered beneath her blanket.
“Accio lesson plans,” she mumbled. If she was up, she might as well be
working. Her notebook full of lesson plans rattled on the shelf and started
their way toward her.
She had hit the point in the term where things weren’t quite new
anymore. Although they most certainly weren’t any less exciting, the excitement
wasn’t always paired with a positive connotation.
*Thud* notebook hit the ground. “Lumos, “she whispered. The room
brightened.
Sighing, Professor Dawson climbed out of her four poster bed and picked
up her lesson plans. She flipped through
her notes and squinted at her messy print.
She still struggled with her magic. It was new to her, newer than the
curriculum she had begun teaching. She was always interested in magical
creatures, that part was second nature to her. But magic itself was a
completely different beast.
“Accio glasses.” Her glasses too started toward her and then dropped to
the ground. However, this time she had anticipated the fall and was able to
catch them. After sliding her glasses over her ears she found her way to the
right page in her notebook. She thought to herself: ‘Will they like it? Is it
too much? How many times will I trip over my own feet during that lesson?’
Her students could see right through her when she struggled to control
her powers. Some were sympathetic, others fed off of it. Either way, she
couldn’t blame them. She was still trying to figure out how to merge her love
for Magical Creatures and her newfound magic therefore, her lessons didn’t
always go as planned – something she had anticipated, but living the
experience, well that was similar to the difference between reading about a
blast ended skrewt and being stung by one.
She had been over the lesson plans at least four times and practiced
them out loud, like she used to when she pretended to be a Hogwarts professor
as a child. She had no idea that she would actually end up here but she had
always imagined what it would be like.
It wasn’t quite the same as she had pictured. ‘Is anything though?’ Some
days were even more fantastical than she could imagine. Others were more difficult
and sometimes even tedious. It wasn’t as though she didn’t know she’d have bad
days, off days -- days where she literally dropped absolutely everything she
touched and then proceeded to trip over the Malfoy kids’ school bag and then
pretended not to see him laughing hysterically at her while she picked herself
up off of the classroom floor. No, she knew that she could get lost in a paper
bag, or fall up the changing staircase. She didn’t however, anticipate Moaning
Myrtle moving from the first-floor girls’ bathroom to the bathroom inside the
Professor’s common room – a surprise that led to teaching her first class in
soaked robes. But more importantly, she couldn’t envision the extent to which
she would connect to her students – a realization that made everything more
difficult and at the same time, more rewarding.
