Genre Reflection: Ms. Dawson and the Halls of Hogwarts Part 2

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.