She explains this compromise to Feral, when the semester changes over. She's just in the next segment of each of the core curriculum courses - no electives till seventh grade, when the brooms course is over with - but they'll have all different teachers and schedules and classmates. (Feral is still in her Defense course, and now so are Sherlock and Tony; she has the twins in brooms and theory, too, and Feral in potions.) "Bugs are really stupid and they have really simple nervous systems. You could probably get a B like I did if you would work on bugs."
"I'm not sure why you'd squish them but not want to burn them. They can't feel much of anything."
"Well, if you worked out doing bugs instead of mice with the teacher like I did ahead of time and then it turned out you didn't want to that'd be a wasted effort. You can just find a spider somewhere outside and check real quick."
"Yeah, probably not, unless there's standardized tests for it later that I haven't heard about yet."
"Well, you could at least stop having to sit out entire lessons. You can get really really good at sixth grade stuff," she snorts. "And practice outside of classes, if you want to catch your own bugs and read other years' textbooks from the library, I dunno if you care enough."
"Oh well. At least I found a way around the problem. I'll even do mice once I'm good enough - I guess you can too when you grow out of the fire thing."