"...but if you shoot up a school children are dead. ...And in contact with things while being dead, if you must."

"If you asked people 'why hasn't anyone shot up a school, there are after all an awful lot of people and some are terrible', people'd have about the same intuitions about it as 'why hasn't anyone dyed a red's hair and disguised them as a clean caste and helped them escape'. I am not making claims about which action actually causes more harm."

Sigh.

"They're out there, but you can't say so."

"Well. I will have my school and it will probably have a handful of red mages in it who will go around with Adamants."

"I hope that works."

"Me too."

About how many students in the first class is she looking at probably? They should all be clear now.

A hundred sixteen! Of late-spring conceptions it looks like it's about one in five thousand. Statisticians are trying really hard to figure out the dietary factor.

Well by then she will have some kind of scheme where the earlier students can teach the later ones. Hundred sixteen is not too awful. She announces that it would be a good idea for those families to try to befriend and socialize native elementals to be translators and magic helpers, especially if it isn't convenient to teach them Anitami.

The blue and green children will all be fluent in Anitami by the time they are of magic-school age, tutors having been hired, and they're seeking out elementals to be friends and magic assistants for their kids. Other people email asking how they befriend an elemental exactly.

They could talk to the elemental response team about bringing them along next time they respond to an elemental in their area, or just go up to one if they find one, and they should be very gentle and patient about things the elementals don't understand and find out what they are interested in and offer to help with that.

...this person works full-time in construction and then bartends in the evenings; her husband is gone for months at a time in the shipping industry. One set of grandparents runs a little bodega open sunrise-to-sunset and the other takes their grandbaby mage with them while they work as janitors. 

Maurabel can try to send them an elemental she or her elemental friends cultivate but she can't do that for everyone.

Then lots of baby mages will not have the resources to go elemental-befriending. 

The blue mage has six elemental friends already and wants to collect the whole set!

That seems inefficient. Are the baby mage's parents aware that there is only one mage teacher and if she is slowed down catching up students without such advantages their baby mage will get a worse education? Perhaps the elemental friends could be shared.

The baby blue mage's parents will pay Maurabel extra to teach their daughter at her own pace instead of sticking her in a crowded classroom full of purples. Lots extra.

Maurabel is not in it for the money.

It seems unfair to the capable students to teach the class at the pace of the slowest students. Maybe there could be two classes.

"Your daughter might not even be good at magic."

She might not! It's not really a blue occupation. If she's the worst in the class it'd be unfair for all the more capable students to be stuck waiting, right?

"I'm probably going to split it up just because of sheer numbers but I won't know who's good at it until there's been more assessment."

Has she considered that caste might be fairly predictive.

"Intelligence has to do with some of it but isn't well-correlated with number of affinities or magic talent per se."

What goes into magic talent?

"It's its own thing. I've heard it compared to cooking and tapestry design and remembering your dreams and dancing."