Teaching in the medieval paradigm
I’ve always been bothered by teaching within the medieval paradigm. It is easy to represent sequential learning by assuming a character learns X for one season, but it doesn’t represent learning about a broad range of subjects. A broad range of subjects isn’t necessary for the Educated person or the Baccalaureus. But relying upon Art and Academy for a framework, and assuming the modern idea of semesters, there are 6 terms in a baccalaureus program, because it takes 3 years to complete and the character receives 90 xp.
So I began experimenting with how that 90 xp is earned over each term (each term gives 15 xp). One of the things I did was to deemphasize the instructor a bit, and bring the text into the teaching process, which is why I changed how summae and tractatus function. Certain assumptions are in effect and are represented in how we'll do teaching in this saga. We use the modern semester process, where a semester is about three months or a season long. Students need to return home in the summer to perform chores, and one season is free (holidays, breaks and the like), as is common under the mythic paradigm in Ars. Maybe the terms are 4.5 months long due to weather, and including the breaks, but that still leaves 2 seasons of teaching and one season free over those 9 months. A student’s job is to learn, and I have no problem with them earning more XP in the seasons where they are being a student, especially as the time period is limited. So the challenge came to be how to represent a student learning 90xp over the course of 6 semesters, I ignored the free season and the season going back home to work on the farm. For characters under development they are represented by the 15 xp earned for each year of age, anyway. Getting a SQ of 15 per semester is tough. Pulling out the standard or base bonus of 3, you have 12 points of quality necessary from the teacher. 12 isn’t absurdly high, especially if you can teach in a small single student or two student setting, but that probably wasn’t happening, so now what you have is needing to get a SQ of 12, in a combination of Teaching, Communication and Good Teacher. Even if you have Good Teacher your Teaching AND Communication need to total 7. It’s a bit of a stretch, so something is missing. Enter the summa.