Chapter 6: Start of Term

Snape had spent a busy week preparing for the swiftly approaching start of the school year. The students had arrived yesterday, and he had observed the familiar routine of the Welcoming Feast from the unfamiliar vantage point of the Head Table. Slytherin got its fair share of the new students in the Sorting. Other than seeming ridiculously young, none made any particular impression on Snape, though he was pleased to see them all cheered by their housemates as they took their seats at the Slytherin table. The list included some familiar Wizarding names, as always, for the house of pureblood tradition, among other things. He had also seen some familiar faces among the older students.

However, his first task of the first day of classes did not involve any students of his House. It was teaching double Potions for first years, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw, so he knew none of the students, though he had with him a list Professor McGonagall had provided. Snape arrived just as the bell rang. Though he had seen the new students at the Welcoming Feast the previous night, from the Head Table they had not seemed quite so loud. While he felt well prepared for the class, having given his opening remarks a little thought, and having selected a first potion to introduce for what seemed a felicitous combination of interesting effect and ease of preparation, he was suddenly glad he had not come earlier.

He opened the door to the dungeon classroom, and the students filed noisily in and began to find seats at the long tables arranged in two rows. He waited for the aisle in between to mostly empty of students before sweeping up to the front of the room. As he passed, the chatter died down somewhat, and he began to take the roll.

To his surprise, one of the students did not respond.

“Bones, Archibald,” Snape repeated, sweeping the class with his black eyes. The last of the chatter died down. Several of his students looked away to avoid his gaze. Making a mental note of the name, Snape continued.

Just as he finished reading the roster, the door at the back of the room creaked and opened a crack. Snape picked his wand up from his desk and flicked it at the door, which flew wide open to reveal a tall, skinny boy. He stumbled into the room and the freckled face under his mop of curly brown hair reddened. The unexpected opening of the heavy door must have startled him.

Snape waved the door shut, and waited for the boy to regain his balance.

“Mr. Bones, I presume?” he asked.

“Y- yes, Professor,” the boy responded. “It’s all those stairs that move…”

Snape raised an eyebrow skeptically, and the boy trailed off.

“You are in Hufflepuff, are you not?” Snape asked him.

“Yes, Sir,” the boy responded more confidently.

“Then the entrance to your dormitory is in the same level of the castle as this room, Mr. Bones,” Snape observed dryly. Several of the Ravenclaw students snickered.

“Have a seat, Mr. Bones,” Snape ordered. As the boy walked over to an empty chair, Snape added, “I suggest that between now and your next lesson, you apply yourself to learning the route to this classroom.” He waited for the boy to sit down and put away his things before addressing the class.

"You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion making," he said, speaking quietly, for after the appearance of the unfortunate Bones, all of the students were quiet. "As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. But I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, and even stopper death."

“But for today, something more modest. Who can tell me the use of puffer-fish eyes in a potion?”

The room became quiet enough to hear the proverbial pin drop. As Snape looked around, his students seemed intent on examining the stains on their battered old tables. Clearly, no one was planning to volunteer an answer. Snape thought back to the roll, hoping to pick a suitable target, someone who might actually know the answer. That girl sitting in the back row - she had been reading a book as she waited for class to start … had it been the text? Eloise Pritchett, Ravenclaw, he remembered.

“Miss Pritchett, what is the use of puffer-fish eyes in a potion?” he asked her.

She looked up nervously.

“They help the potion make something get bigger, Professor?” she answered, her intonation turning the statement into a question.

“Is that your answer, or a question, Miss Pritchett?” he asked.

“A guess, sir,” she answered, her voice barely audible.

“And how did you arrive at this guess?” Snape asked her, curious, for it was the correct answer.

The girl flushed. “M-muggles call it the Law of Similarity. That in magic, similar things produce similar effects. I was guessing that for wizards, it might actually work.”

“A student of Muggle history, I see,” Snape said, raising an eyebrow. Another ripple of amusement started around the room. A Muggle-born, almost certainly, Snape deduced. She must have done some research at her local public library after getting her Hogwarts letter. No surprise she ended up in Ravenclaw.

“Indeed, in this case it does,” he confirmed. Glancing around the room, he added, “As you might all know if you had bothered to open your books before coming. Today we will be producing the Swelling Solution, for which they are the primary ingredient.”

It had not been a horrible answer, he thought, looking around with disdain at her snickering classmates. His eye settled on a boy with a particularly loud laugh, seated in the other row, towards the middle of the room.

“However, the effect any ingredient has depends very much on the other ingredients,” he resumed his comments. “For example, substances that are by themselves deadly poisons may have beneficial effects when combined with other ingredients in a potion. Since you seem so amused by Miss Pritchett’s explanation, Mr. Jorkins, I feel confident that you can tell us an instance of this.”

The boy paled slightly, and stopped laughing. Snape regarded him calmly. The room again fell silent.

“Well?” Snape prompted.

“Umm…I didn’t understand the question,” the boy admitted.

“I asked you to name a beneficial potion which includes a deadly poison as an ingredient,” Snape repeated quietly. The boy stared at him blankly.

“Anyone?” Snape asked the class.

“I see you don’t read the news, either,” Snape observed to the ensuing silence. “The recently discovered Wolfsbane Potion, which relieves some of the symptoms of lycanthropy, is an example: its primary ingredient is wolfsbane. Also known as aconite or monkshood, this non-magical plant is a deadly poison.”

Jorkins looked uncertainly at Snape.

“Write it down,” he instructed. The students hurriedly opened notebooks or pulled sheets of parchment out of their bags and started to write.

He walked over to the blackboard and tapped it with his wand, causing a recipe for the Swelling Solution to appear. It was technically a third year potion, but with some adjustments he had made to it, he believed he might have cut the preparation time down sufficiently. At any rate, it ought to prove more interesting to the class than a potion to cure boils, Chapter 1 in the text selected by Professor Slughorn. They could get to that another day.

Snape instructed the students to divide into pairs. Then he swept around the room distributing the puffer-fish eyes and checking that the cauldrons were set up properly before permitting the students to light the braziers underneath.

The class was now bustling with activity, as his students selected ingredients, weighed them with their scales, and started preparing them for use in the potion. The puffer-fish eyes simply needed to be cut in half. That, the students were managing, though they were certainly taking their time about it, and needing to crawl about on the stone floor to retrieve eyeballs which had squirted off the tables, and were now rolling on the floor. However, chopping the gurdyroots seemed beyond any of them.

Suddenly Snape noticed a boy about to toss slices of gurdyroot in an assortment of thicknesses into his cauldron.

“Attention, everyone!” he called, taking the chopping board out of the hands of the surprised boy. “Who can tell me what it wrong with this gurdyroot?”

Again, no one volunteered an answer, so Snape turned to a girl with long, braided hair who was sitting next to the pair whose roots he had selected as an example.

“Miss Midgeon?” he asked.

“Um, are the pieces too big, Professor?” she asked him. He shook his head and looked for another person to ask.

“Are they too small?” piped up a boy from the back of the room. Well, Snape supposed he should give the boy credit for volunteering.

“No, not too small, either,” he said, failing to entirely conceal his irritation at the obvious guess.

Tentatively, Eloise Pritchett raised her hand.

“Yes, Miss Pritchett?”

“Sir, should the pieces be of a uniform size and shape?” she inquired.

“Indeed, Miss Pritchett, they should. Class, I am assigning you an essay, due next week, on cutting techniques used in the preparation of dry ingredients. One roll of parchment.”

Snape walked to the back of the room, hoping to find a decent example of a chopped ingredient to show the class. Instead, he found Miss Pritchett and her partner arguing over a messily chopped pile of gurdyroot.

“Well, why didn’t you say something, Eloise?” her partner was saying in an irritated voice.

“I didn’t know!” she exclaimed defensively.

“Another guess, Miss Pritchett?” Snape asked. She gave a little start, and then nodded at him.

“Something else you read in a Muggle text?” he inquired.

“No, sir. It just seemed … logical, when I thought about it. So the ingredients that make the potion work can be spread out evenly throughout when we stir it.”

Snape nodded his head. Now if she would just think this way before starting work, he might just have one student in this otherwise hopeless class capable of learning to make some interesting potions.

“Carry on, then,” he said, and started another circuit of the room, watching as students worked to even out the sizes of their bits of gurdyroot.

As the class wore on, it began to dawn on Snape that perhaps he might want to consider doing a different potion with his other first-year class, later that week. It looked like nobody would actually finish, even among the few groups who were somewhere along the way to a correct potion. The rest were producing a variety of useless, or dangerous, liquids. Perhaps, also, a short demonstration of some of the techniques was in order. After all, odds were that the brightest, or at least, most studious, students were in this class, not in Slytherin and Gryffindor.

Suddenly a commotion at the front of the class attracted Snape’s attention. A blonde girl was screaming, as her left hand had ballooned to thrice its size and was developing splotches in a rainbow of bright hues. Students started to rush over to see what was happening.

“STAY WHERE YOU ARE!” he shouted, stopping the class in their tracks. He strode rapidly over to the girl and pulled a phial of Deflating Draught from his pocket.

“Here, drink this. Two sips,” he instructed the girl brusquely. As soon as she did so, her hand shrank down to its normal size. The splotches remained, though they seemed to be fading and shrinking, as if being absorbed back into her skin. Snape looked around and ascertained that no one else had been splashed.

“What happened here?” he demanded.

“He flicked the potion at me with his spoon!” the teary-eyed blonde accused her lab partner.

“That girl over there shrieked and swatted a wasp, and it flew over to me, and I –” the boy broke off and reddened in embarrassment.

“-decided to swat it with your ladle, Stebbins?” Snape said caustically.

Stebbins nodded sheepishly.

“In this class, we have a number of lit fires, and cauldrons full of boiling liquids. At times, they will in addition contain dangerous substances. You should be cautious and deliberate in your movements, for your own safety and that of your classmates. Mr. Stebbins, I am taking ten points from Hufflepuff for your carelessness,” Snape said. Turning to the girl Stebbins had indicated, he added, “Miss Foster, your ill-considered overreaction to the insect was also lamentable, so I am taking five points from Ravenclaw as well.”

“Since Mr. Stebbins has, however inadvertently, provided a demonstration of the effects of the Swelling Solution, and since we are almost out of time, we’ll stop here,” Snape announced. “Please bring up a flask to my desk for grading, and then clean up your work areas.”

***

Snape was sitting in his office having some tea, having just gotten back from the Potions laboratory. Most of the supplies he had purchased during the last week had arrived during the day, and he had spent a couple of hours after his last class putting them away. The headache he had developed during the day was receding – the monotonous but orderly work of stowing away Potions ingredients in their proper storage areas had been a welcome antidote to his first day of teaching, and a cup of tea was completing the cure.

He realized that he had not been a typical student. But surely, his classmates had not been as hopeless as the students in the three classes he had seen today? Well, it was the first day back, he told himself. They, and he, needed to get into the swing of things.

A knock on his office door interrupted his musings. Snape walked over and opened the door, to find his diminutive colleague, the Charms professor, standing outside.

“Good afternoon, Professor Flitwick,” Snape greeted him. “Do come in.”

“Thank you, Professor Snape,” Flitwick said in the high, squeaky voice Snape remembered well from Charms classes. It seemed odd to be addressed as Professor in that voice, or to be inviting its possessor into his office. Flitwick stepped in and took a few moments to stroll around and look curiously at the shelves, some already filled with books and specimens.

“I see you are beginning to settle in to your office,” Flitwick said, with an approving smile. “We have not had much chance to talk yet – I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the staff.”

“Thank you, Professor,” Snape replied. “I was just having tea. Might I offer you a cup?”

“Most kind, I wouldn’t mind a cup,” Flitwick agreed. Snape walked over and poured his guest some tea. With a practiced flick of his wand, the Charms professor sent three lumps of sugar flying into his cup, and took a seat in the guest chair Snape had obtained for his office from a storeroom. Another flourish caused a small footrest to appear which prevented the diminutive professor’s feet from dangling a few inches off the floor.

Snape sat down behind his desk and refreshed his own cup.

“Professor Snape, I decided to seek you out after conversations I had with some students in my House, and later with Professor Sprout, this afternoon,” Flitwick said.

“Yes?” Snape prompted.

“Professor Slughorn had his way of running his classes, and you, naturally, will have your own. But – I think you may have been a trifle harsh with Miss Foster and Miss Pritchett today.”

“Miss Pritchett?” Snape repeated, entirely at a loss. He remembered her well – the Muggle-born first year who had guessed the use of puffer fish eyes in potion making and showed some inclination to think logically, at least once pressed to do so. She had been a lone bright spot in an otherwise depressing day.

“She came to my office this afternoon and told me she thought she should quit school,” Professor Flitwick recounted.

“Whatever for?” Snape asked, surprised. “I can’t speak to her performance in any other classes, but she performed acceptably in Potions. Once she learns some basics, she will make a more than competent student. She does well applying her Muggle learning to magical problems. She is Muggle raised, is she not?”

“A Muggle-born, yes,” Professor Flitwick replied. “How did you know that?”

“I deduced it from her answers in class. Being in Slytherin does not preclude knowledge of the Muggle world,” Snape replied evasively.

He continued, “Unlike most of her classmates, she seems capable of logical thought. Once she learns some basics, I am confident she will be an adequate student. Feel free to tell her I said so.”

Flitwick wrinkled his brow as if considering a difficult problem. It occurred to Snape that perhaps Flitwick wanted him to do something about Miss Pritchett. Belatedly, he offered, “Or, if you prefer, I could tell her myself, Professor.”

“Oh no!” Flitwick responded hastily. “No, that will not be necessary. I will speak with her myself.”

“Miss Foster, on the other hand, created a disturbance in my class which contributed to a situation that resulted in an injury to a fellow student. Fortunately not a serious injury, but it could have been,” Snape explained.

“It was unintentional,” Flitwick objected.

“I am aware of the circumstance which prompted her ill-considered action, but I stand by my decision,” Snape said reluctantly. He respected his old teacher, and he did want to make a good first impression on his colleagues, but he was certain he had been right to make an example of Miss Foster and Mr. Stebbins in that class.

“Please understand, Professor Snape,” said Flitwick, “that I am not asking you to reconsider your decision. Just – Miss Foster, and the Hufflepuff boy she startled, are first years. A five or ten point deduction seems a very big deal to a first year student. We, and I feel I speak not only for myself and Professor Sprout, but for the rest of the teachers as well, would not take more than a point or two from a first year student unless the circumstances were truly exceptional.”

“I see,” said Snape. He had not been aware of this unwritten rule, but he could certainly comply with it if it was the custom.

“I will be sure to keep that in mind in the future, Professor Flitwick. Thank you for bringing these matters to my attention.”

“It was my pleasure,” Flitwick replied, setting his teacup down on the desk and rising to his feet. “Well, I should be getting on. Thanks for the tea – the house-elves at Hogwarts do a fine job!”

Snape rose to escort his guest to the door.

“Good day, Professor Flitwick,” he said.

“See you at supper!” Flitwick replied with a wave, as he left the room.

Snape shut the door thoughtfully, wondering what other mysteries of teaching at Hogwarts he still needed to learn.