Flitwick's reputation as a pretty cool guy seems justified so far! Hopefully this class will get to the fun stuff faster than Transfiguration.

Those all sound like such useful things to know. Attentive scribbling.

What lovely children. This is going to be a great class, he just knows it.

He continues: "So! What, then, is a charm? What makes it different from a hex? There is an obvious answer, if you've seen some examples of both. Anyone?"

A kind laugh. "Anyone who hasn't read the book yet, which I can see you have, Miss Granger. I want to hear a guess."

Bruce has already read, not the entire book, but the relevant chapter, and also raising your hand in class causes people to be looking at you so he doesn't.

Susan Bones raises her hand tentatively, and when pointed at, says, "Hexes are for fighting and charms aren't?"

"Precisely the answer I was looking for!" beams Flitwick. "Unfortunately, it is incorrect!"

Susan makes a face.

"No, no, Miss Bones, worry not! It is very intuitive to think so! I have met many adults who learned from other Charms masters, or perhaps who weren't listening in my class -"

(another round of giggles)

" - who still think so, in fact. But it is very important to know," and here his face grows grave, and serious, "because to define spells wrongly in this way often leads people to make errors of judgment. If you learn nothing else from me, I implore you, remember this: many hexes can and should be used peacefully, and in turn many charms can do great harm, if you are not careful with them."

He pauses for dramatic effect.

"Charms," he continues, once that's had time to sink in, "are precisely no more and no less than those spells which have a single, ongoing, but fundamentally temporary effect." The blackboard now has a venn diagram on it.

"A charm, in other words, is a spell that does exactly one thing, that you cast and keep casting until you have achieved the effect you desire," continues Flitwick, "and which will, eventually, wear off on its own, though keep in mind that temporary does not always mean brief and counter-charms, which do exist, are useful in many situations. Any questions so far?"

He doesn't want to attract attention but he wants to knooooow . . . tentative little hand-raise?

When called upon: "Is every spell exactly one of a charm, a hex, or a transfiguration or are there grey areas?" (What he really wants to know is to what extent these categories are ontologically fundamental vs socially constructed, but he doesn't have the conceptual vocabulary to express that.)

Flitwick bounces delightedly on his toes. "Excellent question, Mr. Potter! As far as we know, the only spells which can't be described by one of these three categories fall into the fourth one, right here," he taps the middle of the venn diagram, "which personally I think ought to be called 'enchantments' but the nomenclature debate has been ongoing for three hundred years and doesn't seem likely to be resolved within my lifetime, alas! They are quite rare and have a great deal of idiosyncratic behavior and you won't be dealing with anything in that category until the NEWT level but it certainly does exist! The current understanding is that there are no areas of overlap, however, no, and that spells which have historically been believed to be members of hybrid categories have simply been misunderstood. In fact, this leads me perfectly into my next point!" Delighted hand-clap.

"Unlike these technical categories, which we believe to represent a true distinction between the spell structures, there are other descriptive words that you may hear in your daily life to describe categories of spells. We often call spells curses, for example, when they do something undesirable which is difficult to undo. You will learn very few charms in this class that earn this name, but not none.

"Another historical source of confusion has been jinxes, a term commonly used for spells of relatively low power. In this case the distinction between a charm and a hex may appear to blur, because witches and wizards emit a low level of ambient magic sufficient to reassert their own proper shape against small hostile hexes over a short period." He waggles his fingers and emits some small red sparks for emphasis; they fade rapidly into the air. "You will find, in fact, that this happens particularly rapidly on the Hogwarts grounds, thanks to the population density. Now, I understand that taking advantage of this to play harmless pranks on one another is a time-honored Hogwarts tradition, but I must ask that any such activity be confined strictly to the hours in which you are not in my classroom."

Notes notes notes. This is all very cool. He wonders if they're going to learn hexes in Charms class (or possibly Transfiguration class, but from the tables of contents of various books that's not how he'd bet) since there isn't a Hexes class on the syllabus, but doesn't ask because it's going to be obvious eventually and he's already raised his hand once.

"Now then!"

Flitwick waves his wand, and the diagram on the board becomes a bulleted list.

"For today's activity, I would like you to please look up each of these spells in your Standard Book of Spells and read the description of what it does, and write down a brief summary - a sentence at most will do - and whether it is labeled as a charm or a hex. This, I hope, will both help you develop your understanding of the categories and give you some practice looking things up in your book! If you aren't done when the bell rings, bring it to me by the start of next class, and in the meantime, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to raise your hand and ask!" 

Looking things up in the Standard Book of Spells, they will learn shortly, is a slightly different skill from looking things up in a mundane dictionary or encyclopedia.

For one thing, the spell entries themselves are in order by what appears to be a magic throughput rating: the things at the front of the book are spells that a witch or wizard who has just obtained their wand today can probably learn to cast, and the things near the end are spells that a first-year likely cannot cast at the start of the year but should build up enough channeling capacity by the end to be able to cast if they practice. There's a table giving the minimum number of months after the critical 11th birthday that a student should wait before beginning each chapter. 

For another, the indices are not in alphabetical order either by descriptive name or incantation; there are two, one ordered by key emphatic syllable (for example "lumos" is listed right next to "alohomora") and one ordered by effects effects (for example "lighting fires: see bluebell flames, p165; incendiary charm, p152; cauldron-heating, p76 [...]" and so on). Flitwick's list has the relevant syllables underlined to look things up in the incantations index, but it's still an adjustment if one is used to looking things up by their first letter.

Each entry, once located, looks approximately like so:

Wand-Lighting Charm

Incantation: Lumos (loo-mohs)

[diagram of wand-flick]

Function: Causes the tip of the wand to glow white.

Variability: Low; brightness of light may be somewhat increased or decreased within a small range.

Counter: Wand-Darkening Charm (see p28)  

[currently inscrutable spell structure diagram]

Bruce is only half done with the assignment when class ends because he spends too much time trying to scrute the spell structure diagrams. His pensmanship is rapidly approaching "tolerable", at least.

On the one hand, this is easy. On the other, it is boring. Maybe next week they'll get to cast something. At least with this class he won't get in trouble for just trying stuff out of the book in the common room.

Hermione, who has already read the book and is used to its indexing mechanism, completes the assigned task very quickly, of course. 

After an extremely unsuccessful attempt to help Justin Finch-Fletchley with quill-writing ("help" having taken the form of "tell him he's doing it wrong", she immediately got shouted at by three other Hufflepuffs) she sulks her way back to it and starts working her way through the book from the front doing the same summarization for each entry. By the end of class she has not yet reached her aspirational bookmark (placed neatly at the limit, according to the chart in the front of the book, of her probable biological spellcasting ability).

When the bell rings, Flitwick collects papers from those who are done - less than half the class - and waves them away with a cheerful "see you tomorrow morning! we're going to talk about spell diagrams!"

Diagrams!

Talking.

"D'you want to try casting some of those after classes are over?" he asks Bruce and Hermione on their way to the next thing.

He almost says "Yes!" immediately but then realizes he can't do that and binge on library books at the same time, oh no. "Oooh, that would be fun. Are you allowed to practice spells in the library?" That would at least let them switch back and forth rapidly which is not as good but still close.

"That sounds like it'd involve... talking... in the library? But we should ask."

"If it isn't allowed we could . . . check some books out and then take them back to the common room and do spells?" He's pretty sure you're allowed to check books out from every library unless you've been specifically asked not to because, for example, Dudley threw the last ones you checked out in the lake and Aunt Petunia didn't want to pay for replacements.

Hermione has never in her life been asked not to check out any additional books from a library and if presented with this concept might actually cry.

Fortunately he didn't say that out loud, so she remains chipper and full of anticipatory book-enthusiasm.

"Yeah, sounds like a plan!"

Their last scheduled class of the day is Defense Against the Dark Arts, which is held in a classroom so densely fogged with perfume that it is not initially straightforward to detect that it contains a professor.

"I wonder what we're getting this year. You guys know about the curse, right?"

"No, what curse?" Concern!