Hey Zip, if you're cool with questions, I'd like to know more about Raymond as a professor. Not sure if you plan on touching on it in the story but what were his classes like? Is he actually any good at teaching? Did he like doing it? (...are any of his old students still around?)
Feel free to answer as much or as little as you like. Thanks!
Hey there! I am always totally cool with questions. I got a dome full of background information and only a narrative to try and spill it into otherwise😅
I do apologize in advance though, as I cannot summarize for the life of me.
So! When Raymond was teaching back in the 60's, the magical community was still very secluded. It wasn't a secret, but access to that information was incredibly hard to come by without already being within it. (For comparison, this is technically the same universe as my Rose & Laporte stories, and the magical community is much more open and lax in that universe when it comes to 'mundane' folks.) So, what Raymond was studying and teaching in those days were mostly magical fundamentals and how it works. In this universe, magic is a fact of existence/force of nature in the same way that gravity and magnets and time and space are. It's like an energy that permeates existence itself, and magic users are just those that can latch onto that energy manipulate it for their own use, sometimes intentional, sometimes not. Raymond's classes were about understanding what that energy is, how it can be harnessed, and what forms that takes.
Which then leads into discussing magical mediums (i.e. potion making, gemstone magic, sigil/symbol/rune work, enchanting, charms, etc, etc, etc) and I could really just go into a long babble about what that actually entails bc I've been hammering out the details of this sort of Mental Expanded Fantasy Universe in my head since... =checks notes= 2005, but i'll stop myself there to save everyone some scrolling, but that's the nature of what he studied and what he taught.
He will tell people his interest is purely academic, for the sake of record and interest, but deep down he just wants to figure out for himself. Thinks that if he breaks down the whole of magic down to its core components and understands every facet, he'll eventually be able to use it himself. Nothing else has certainly ever worked for him.
All that being said, I do think he was a very good teacher. You need someone who is passionate about a topic, and there are practically no other Non Magic Folk with a passion for the study like Raymond Archer. He's deeply fascinated with it all, and he wants to share that with as many people as he can. He sees a lot of value in the information, and thinks it can ultimately do a lot of good in a lot of ways (for instance, in making it easier for the magical community to integrate more seamlessly into modern mundane society. Understanding leads to Acceptance, and I don't think it would be a stretch to say that his papers and books on the subject were incredibly helpful on a wider scale than he realizes.)
So... yes. He was a good teacher, and I think he truly loved the job. It wasn't a class a lot of people were looking to take, as it wasn't taken very seriously still, but those who were there cared about the subject matter and that made it much more fulfilling for him.
Whether any of those students are still alive today though... I mean I'm sure there are some. They would have been twentysomethings in 1969, so you're looking at people in their late seventies and early eighties at this point. To be entirely truthful, I haven't at this time given his former students a great amount of thought. I've focused much more on someone else from his past that's still kicking ;D (Stella was going to bring it up with the other stuff, but uh... after going to sleep mode she elected to hold back on follow up questions for now. they'll get there though~) Thank you so much for the questions, mock! sorry it turned into a small lecture, but as stated, I cannot summarize for anything x_x