They take pictures and notes. "What do each of these symbols mean? How many of them are there in use? Can you make new ones?"

He will give a whole lecture on that! There are thousands, different people use different stylizations or subsets, meaning anything from kinds of animals to kinds of weather to kinds of actions. You can make new ones but they have to be personally meaningful or used kind of a lot before the world catches on. The bident, here, can mean royalty or mining and that's new in the last twenty years.

Eventually they move on to meditation exercises. To one person in particular, stepping through the circles feels... Different.

"- oh I think I noticed a thing - can I try it blinded -"

"Oh, a good sign! Here." He has a bandanna. "I'll hold your hand and guide you."

She ties the bandana around her eyes and holds out her hand.

Solomon guides her around a bit, then through the circle for earth without pausing, once she's plausibly lost track of her exact position.

"Ah! There!" she exclaims delightedly.

"Yes, there! What do you feel? What element is it?"

"It's - not fire - not air either - I think earth?"

"Yes, earth. Okay! Let's step forward a bit more and... How about... Now."

She's in the all-four salt circle, now.

"- this one I'm not su- oh, there's a salt one, it's that."

"Excellent! You've picked this up very quick. See how it's - sort of intuitive? Can you describe what it feels like to everyone else?" He glances around. "Anyone else want to try blind walking?"

"I didn't feel anything..."

"I might have but could have been imagining it? I'd try."

"It feels like I'm... standing in a compass rose? - metaphorically?"

"The way you feel the elements and spirits is ultimately personal. I see them, you might hear them or smell them or feel them."

He passes the blindfold to the next candidate. 

"And some people simply do not have the talent, that unfortunately may be the case for some of you. I wouldn't call it quits just yet though, any of you."

The next candidate can't tell yet when he's in a circle but can do better than chance guessing which one.

This is also promising! Everyone gets a turn.

Nobody else can manage yet.

After the meditation session is over he lets the two who noticed something know that he might be reaching out for individual tutoring, then emails the Dwarf that got him the teaching grant with the news that this person definitely is learning and that one probably is, what now?

The grantmakers will get in touch and give him an extension.

How much of an immortality necklace is what he has in total worth? The teleporter's fine for accidentally stranding him, and the first and second grants, are the vast bulk of his income, with only a few incidentals, a cheap room, and some teaching supplies subtracting.

An immortality necklace is more than that, but he can also just go to Cube and morph younger, which covers many of the same use cases.

...This is his real original body! It's irreplaceable! Maybe he can morph once or twice, that sounds like something to do and might even be insightful, but not stay in it permanently.

He pays on some job-sharing site to get help setting up the scheduler tool of the education software the Dwarf recommended him to arrange weekly half-hour individual lessons with everyone going forward, and then reads up more about Cube and morph.

Cube is a universe with an Earth, but like all Earths it is not like the others; in particular it has a thus-far-unique complement of aliens, such as Yeerks and Andalites, and also it kind of sits on top of a "world"-like dimension called z-space, which enables a local FTL method (it's not very good) and also morph (it's great). Worlds adjacent to Cube can use z-space-reliant tech but the experiments that made z-space evident to advanced civilizations in Cube don't turn up the suggestive results there, so probably it wouldn't have been invented there, or not for a much longer time.