"There's clubs and things, and one-time circles on very specific things like hivebugs or whatever."

"Sounds like I'll be able to find something interesting. What are the circles like, is there anything I should know about them?"

"All the students stand in a circle and if there's a teacher the teacher's in the middle? And you stomp on the ground if you want attention."

"I think I can work with that. In my world usually have the teacher stand by a wall, with everyone looking at her or him, and then she or he can hang things on the wall for the students to look at, or write on it, if it's the right kind of wall for that."

"Very big lectures are sometimes like that! Little classes it's nice to have outside."

"How many students would you usually have in a class?"

"Oh, like ten."

"That'll do it, I'd expect more like twenty usually. I bet yours are nicer, though, you get more of the teacher's attention."

"Yeah, twenty sounds too big - sometimes they let it get up to fifteen, if a lot of people want in."

"Wow. I think the largest lecture I've ever been to was a couple hundred, that's not common but it happens sometimes, when you have someone famous giving a talk on something popular."

"I haven't been to any of those but I think they exist."

"Well, we do a whole range of sizes. If you go to wizard school I'd expect some of your classes to be twenty or thirty, and some to be bigger and either just be lectures or be ones where you'll break up into groups to do things with a few of your classmates, and then if you're studying something unusual or have a question that's too specific for the whole class to want to hear, your teachers will have time set aside to meet with you. Or if you think you'll have trouble in a school set up like that you could take an apprenticeship, that's also pretty common for wizards."

"It sounds fine, probably? Just like it couldn't be very discussion-oriented, it'd be more like reading a book. Is that what the small groups are for?"

"Mmhmm. Or they assign a reading ahead of time and whichever students are interested in talking to the teacher about it do and the rest listen, that works pretty well for us."

"Are most of them not interested in talking about it?"

"Mm, if you started a conversation they'd probably have something to say? But they might not think it was interesting enough to talk about in class, or they wouldn't want to say it if someone else already had. And some humans don't like talking in front of groups very much."

"Huh. I guess maybe boys are like that but girls aren't."

"Well, we're used to having different species of people around, I expect we'll be okay getting used to you."

"Different... species of people...?"

"I know that translates oddly, since you only have the one word. There are lots of species that do person-things in my world, so we have names for the different species and then a word for talking about all of them but not animals. If I'm going to do a language circle I might ask the students how they think it should work, whether 'person' should be the word for your species or whether you want to use it to mean all person-ey species and come up with something else for yourselves. Or do something else, I guess."

"Off the top of my head I'd say 'talkers'."

"Sure, that works. -not all species that are smart enough that we count them do talk, but it's a pretty good way to guess, at least."

"...why don't they talk?"

"Some of them can't make enough different sounds for it, I don't know if that's all of them. They still learn languages, though, and you can tell them things just like any other talker."

"Yeah, I think if they can understand talking that counts just fine."