Oh, the King is great, everyone likes him.

He's keeping his thoughts to himself, here, but monarchs who insist that everyone make a show of liking them seem scarier and probably less stable than the ones who don't care. 

He's also human and would like some time to eat and rest and prepare tomorrow's lessons. 

That's not a problem.

He eats. He writes down as much of the elementary mathematics curriculum that he can remember off the top of his head and makes notes about what he'll have to rederive. He tries not to think about how mortal beings, once the bare possibility of freedom is made known to them, cannot help but long for it. They've got an evil god to fight. He sleeps. 

The Quendi bring him breakfast, and notify him the King's arrival will be in the mid-afternoon, which should allow plenty of time for him to do lessons, if he wants, or get ready, if he wants.

The best way to get ready for meeting the King is to prove himself indispensable. He'll do lessons. 

He'll have a room of cooperative Quendi eager to learn cantrips.

That's great! 

He's going to start with the spell he demonstrated yesterday, Detect Magic. (Children on Golarion are usually taught Prestidigitation first, but he finds it much easier to learn everything else when he can see what he's doing). Many people consider mastering their first cantrip the hardest part of learning magic. They shouldn't feel discouraged if they don't get it this week, or this month, or this year – although he's getting the sense that they probably won't be. 

Indeed they seem to think it's not a big deal at all if it takes years! Most crafts do!

(Since this is all ostensibly useful for fighting their local evil torture god, it kind of seems like a big deal to him. Though perhaps Quendi learn as quickly as humans and just have higher standards for mastery). 

Today, they're just going to focus on the process of holding a magical structure in their mind and working it on the world. If there's a good way to teach this, it's not known to his civilization, and he's open to experimenting – they should tell him what's working and what isn't.

As a first resort, they should all close their eyes, empty their senses, and hold in their minds the image of a circle. Not some fuzzy dream-shaped idea of a circle – it should be as crisp and real as life. Can they do that? 

They can!! They can send him their circles for approval, but they're in fact all very good at detailed mental visualization.

Very convenient. Then they can start building out the structure. He'll demonstrate (osanwë is so convenient). 

Quendi are very good at visualization, and can get crisp mental images of a cantrip structure without difficulty. 

Maybe they'll be unusually quick with magic – human children usually struggle with this part. 

Now he can start explaining what all those transformations actually do. 

They have a bunch of advantages over human children! They're attentive and have good memories and talk with each other constantly and can see everything that's happening with osanwe.

They are not, actually, any faster at learning to build a cantrip, for all that.

That's – actually pretty surprising. 

In what ways are they slow? Is there anything they seem to be struggling with?

Not - visibly? They're meticulous, which makes them slower, and they don't seem to try things very much - they only make tiny changes from whatever they did the last time -

In his experience, human children't don't either – though of course, in his experience, human children are beaten for deviating from the precise structure they're being taught. 

What happens if he explicitly encourages them to experiment more? 

They will cooperatively try to follow his instructions but they don't seem to possess the slightest intuition for what he's actually asking of them.

Huh. He personally learns best by experimenting, but he's not sure if best practice here is to push more or accept that this is just what Quendi are like as a species. 

– He's going to explain this and ask them if he should push more or accept that this is what Quendi are like as a species. 

...Quendi are not really accustomed to thinking of themselves as having collective traits as a species, rather than just being what people are like. There are humans but no one has interacted with them much.

Humans trying to learn this material – he can't speak for other species on Golarion – would be much more proactive about it. The human child's natural instinct is to play with magic, to twist it and tug it, to see what it can do. It takes discipline to train that instinct out of them. Quendi seem to be missing it. 

Now, he's not certain this is a problem. He was trained to be strictly methodical, and he learned magic just fine. He's sure all of them will too. It's just that if he figures out how Quendi learn, he might be able to get them there much faster. 

Quendi learn by observation, usually, watching a master of an art without interrupting until they comprehend this themselves. They certainly wouldn't claim it's the fastest way to learn; it's the one that imposes the fewest burdens on the masters of a craft, which is its own virtue. 

That won't be a very efficient way to learn magic – even if he's using osanwë to show them what he sees, Detect Thoughts only lasts for a minute. Besides, there's only so far observation can take you if you don't understand the theory.

To that end, they can spend the rest of the lesson doing more math. (Magical theory isn't just mathematics, but there's a lot one needs to know before it starts making sense). 

Math they're notably good at, compared to any human he's ever taught math to or learned alongside! Many of them have spent a couple of centuries watching mathematical theory evolve. The mathematicians will be so delighted it turned out to describe something that really exists.