Stephen Fairchild | Numair Salmalín (storkman) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2015-02-07 23:15:00 |
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Entry tags: | mina adler, stephen fairchild |
Who: Stephen Fairchild and Mina Adler
What: Mina has a question. She finds more answers than she expected.
Where: Stephen's office.
When: Friday, February 6th, afternoon
Warnings: Probably none, but tbd
It wasn't as though Stephen disliked his open office hours. When he'd first started off, as a young professor, he'd been excited about the chance to impart more knowledge one-on-one. That, however, was before he'd realized that the majority of students who came to his office for them were just there to ask him for an extension, or to complain about grades - not even to discuss them, or explain why precisely they were entitled to a higher one. There would have been room for negotiation, if they had, or at least bonus points for demonstrating better understanding verbally than in written form. After he'd gotten a reputation for delivering additional philosophy lectures to those who came into his office for even the most benign purpose, lectures which weren't even constrained by the need to stick to notes and a syllabus, the number of students who braved his office hours trickled down to, essentially, none.
When he'd begun teaching at Cornell, he'd held a faint hope that this would change. He was, largely, wrong. There was, of course, the initial burst of students testing his limits to see whether or not he would agree to extensions and grade changes, but his reputation had built even more quickly than before - largely, he'd discovered, thanks to a 'Rate My Professors' website where his students had been able to look at reviews from his old university (the pepper next to his name had been flattering, once he'd figured out what it meant). There had been a few who continued to come in, though only Hannah Ryan was likely to drop by on even a semi-regular basis. After learning that they were both reincarnates, her questions had occasionally started having nothing whatsoever to do with class; not that Stephen minded the chance to do a bit of research in order to answer them.
In fact, it was because of one of those questions that Stephen had taken a trip to Numair's tower to fetch a few books. He wasn't expecting Hannah back quite yet, so he had chosen to spend this open office hours flipping through one of them, trying to find a reference that he could have sworn he remembered from his first time through it. The rap on his cracked open office door took him by surprise, and he sat up straight from his slump, moving his feet from the second chair in his office that he had pulled around to his side of the desk. He didn't bother hiding the magical tomes on his desk; he doubted any of his students would actually be surprised by anything he happened to have sitting around, anymore.
Clearing his throat and sticking a memo from his department head into the book to hold his place, he called out, "Come in."