There's an older student - maybe a senior? he's got an adult amount of facial hair - sitting right next to her who is reading the syllabus with an increasingly disbelieving expression.

When he gets to the end he stands up. "Fuck this shit," he says. "I'd rather fight this book than memorize it."

And he walks out. 

No one else does that but there's some apprising of the books as opponents.

THIS upperclassman looks positively GLEEFUL.

She pulls out a notebook.

Twenty six weeks per semester times seven days is one hundred and eighty-two days, so fourteen hundred and fifty divided by one hundred and eighty two is - "Almost exactly eight medicines a day, if you started right now. Which is not impossible? Of course that's also not the only thing in the course - "

"My life is going to be Avicenna and apprenticing with the nurse." She looks delighted at the prospect.

"Are either of you cheerful kids selling the homework and quizzes," someone asks irritably.

"Of course."

"Yes."

        Floofy-haired girl in the back. "Can you believe that normal high schools have school shootings and we don't."

"Normal high schools don't have school shootings, that's an American thing," says her neighbor helpfully.

       "Can you believe that normal American high schools have school shootings and we don't."

"Well, be the change you wish to see in the world."

       " - okay," says a different girl in a different corner, "I'll pay anyone to take my quizzes for me who gets at least an 80 on the first 2, and until then we're gonna need a study group, so - Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays work period plus all day Sunday, Munich/Barcelona reading room?"

"I've got a conflict Monday and Wednesday work period but we can split into two study groups?"

"Is that offer open to everyone here?" She can't remember if she has a conflict, she should have spent this weekend making a proper planner instead of a flash card wallet.

"Sure thing, doomed frosh."

"I have work period commitments but can do evenings and Sundays," someone else says.

This is a great class! She's going to learn a bunch about healing and also take quizzes for everyone and earn back some of the absurd amount of mana she's been spending on her apprenticeship. 

She's going to sort out her study group schedule with Evenings And Sundays Person.

She can - take the Barcelona and Munich people up on the Sunday reading room thing, that sounds important, and then probably evenings is better than work periods because she's pretty sure the group is probably planning to spend work periods together, and evenings are just as good? - also she kind of wants to be around the one girl who looks excited about this class.

"...are you a native speaker of the Arabic?" Wen Qing asks Naima.

"I am. I'm from Cairo, and I can read four pages a minute. - of a normal book in Arabic, maybe not these books."

"You seem interested enough not to immediately drop the course, perhaps we should study together? I'm a junior with a healing affinity but I'm weaker with the Arabic."

"I have a healing affinity but I'm - newer at it than that, obviously. But I'm very good at Arabic and I'm going to work hard at it, yes."

"Excellent." She bends over the book and starts to flip through it to see what Avicenna has to say about psychiatry, the most interesting subfield of the most interesting topic.

Avicenna... seems to be borrowing some material from Galen, so he's of the opinion that all medicine is related to an individual's temperament and imbalances in the four humors, which you could spin as all physical medicine being interconnected with psychiatry, if you were trying to put it in modern terms.

Oooh she wants to do some stuff with that in comp class.

Fortunately, not being Wei Wuxian, she's able to stay on topic and start at the beginning. "Do you know the traditional Chinese medicine?"

"I don't. I know some things about Greek medicine, and I know something about modern medicine, but I don't know what the traditional theories are in China."

"If we study together I can write up notes on the traditional Chinese medicine and you can do the Greek medicine and we can both do the modern medicine?"

"Yes. Absolutely." Now she's going to need to make sure she actually knows more than the incredibly basic stuff about Greek medicine that everyone probably knows, but - that sounds much easier to dive further into than doing traditional Chinese medicine alone.

Wen Qing is not going to give away valuable traditional Chinese medicine tutoring to a freshman for free, so she starts reading Avicenna and asking Naima questions about words she's uncertain of.

Okay THAT she can definitely handle. She knows Arabic and she knows medicine and she's kind of shaky on Arabic medicine but probably her kind of shaky is still way better than - almost anyone else in this class, although there's one boy who looks like he might be from central asia somewhere and maybe he knows it.

Whatever. She can definitely answer questions about words.

...Wen Qing immediately forgets that she's supposed to not be giving away valuable traditional Chinese medicine tutoring for free in her excitement about contrasting Avicenna's medical worldview with the medical worldviews she's more familiar with.

- okay, great.

Naima can pull out a notebook and take her usual shorthand-style notes on what the excited girl says, and also occasionally comment that this or that reminds her of Galen or Hippocrates.

Isn't.... all of that stuff not true, thinks a very unhappy senior who has not thought about medicine since mundie middle school, where it definitely talked about bacteria and viruses and stuff not humours, and his parents never said "oh yeah actually the ancient Greeks were right". He does not ask this question. It doesn't really matter. 

Unfortunately for Naima, Wen Qing has questions about how exactly it reminds her of Galen.

Shit. "Okay, uh, Galen's theory of medicine is I think the one that introduced the four humors, which are - blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm." Please don't ask what liquids these ideas actually correspond to. "The idea was that a small imbalance in them caused personality traits, like, uh, blood is associated with being enthusiastic and hot-tempered, but a larger imbalance causes various illnesses, like - uh, I don't remember what too much blood does, but I think too much black bile causes acute depression, that sort of thing. It sounds like Avicenna is keeping that - that'll be Greek influence, not him thinking it up again on his own, I think - but combining that with this idea of the traditional four elements of earth, air, water, and fire, and the idea that some sicknesses are also caused by imbalances between these elements, which are held to make up all substances, including the human body."

"Hm. The traditional Chinese medicine has xue and jinye-- uh, the blood and the fluids-- but it doesn't distinguish different kinds of jinye. It seems like the humors correspond to the elements, which also play an important role in the traditional Chinese medicine, but we have the metal and the wood instead of the air. I wonder what happens if you try to correspond ji-- the bodily fluids to the Chinese elements."

"Chinese medicine has five?"

"Yes. The fire, the earth, the water, the wood, the metal."

She writes that down. "Okay. Uh, I think that Avicenna is looking at - contrasts, here, between the different elements? Which ones are hot and which ones are cold, which ones are wet and which ones are dry, stuff like that. So I guess you could also try to sort the Chinese elements in accordance with which traits they have, and see what they might correspond to. I don't - really know how this ties into medicine or illnesses, but I guess we'll find out."

"We also see the cycles in traditional Chinese medicine-- the wood feeds the fire, the fire produces the earth, the earth bears the metal, the metal collects the water, the water nourishes the wood. I wonder if you see the cycles in Avicenna."

...those don't really sound like real cycles but she's writing them down anyway. Like, she supposes there's a sense in which fire produces earth, like, metamorphic or igneous rocks or something, but does metal meaningfully collect water? Can't lots of things do that?

"Maybe? I think - it looks like the first book does have a section talking about cosmology and the relationships between the elements, over here, so maybe it has something like that there?"