It's symbolic.

"...I suppose I could...

"...I have no idea if practicing wand stuff in here would have any effect on my ability to do it waking."

"It helps!  Builds the mental habits, though not the muscle-memory.  I could show you -- wait, no, can't show you a book; the text won't stay reliable if I'm not looking.  I can demo you some beginner exercises?"

"Just put up some patterns directly?  ...How is one supposed to hold a wand, anyway..."

"Just this fist grip is fine for rough work... for really rough work you should really be using a staff anyway... but here, try this for fine knots.  It's best to learn with the fine one to start."

(She demonstrates something rather like a pencil hold.)

She plucks - well, it ends up looking rather like a conductor's baton, for murkily subconscious reasons - out of thin air, and prepares to memorize.

Aeslin is very rusty at teaching beginners, and her last memories of trying (from her brief time in a magical primary school, she mentions) aren't pleasant.  But she's very good at repeating and pointing out what Mira needs to fix.

It's waving something around in a particular pattern; this is the kind of thing one can self-teach from sufficient diagrams or just fucking around, which she knows because she's done that.  It's the rest that's probably going to be trouble.

"...I have such an idea for a training tool for this sort of thing."  She doesn't know if the malleability of dream-memory will fuck things up, but that generally never happens until something's out of sight out of mind, so when she tags the tip of her wand to leave a trail of light behind it, she's cautiously hopeful it'll work.

"Oh?  Would it work outside dreams?  Or even if not, that'd be a reason to try to get people to learn dreamwalking..."

"Well, you tell me, yes?"  She gestures to the tracery her most recent attempt left.

"Oh yeah, I've seen instructors doing that sometimes -"

"... oops.  Uh, sorry?  I guess I didn't think of it."

She repeats her most recent examples with tracing.

"Aheh.  It's fine, you're, like, the magic equivalent of a tenured professor teaching 400-level classes, you haven't needed to think about the Intro To Magic basics for...  A while.  So like.  Yeah.  I can't blame you for not thinking of it."

She continues practicing!

"Heh... I more work on researching than teach...  okay, yeah, that's a fair comparison.  Though we really don't have colleges in the modern Muggle sense...  and we really don't have any classes introducing magic to adults like you."

"...Well, that seems awful."

"Because... what is the point of muggle colleges after all?  Just more school for people who won't read the books and do the experiments for themselves?  But somehow need chemistry and foreign languages and literature papers and all the other distribution requirements I avoided because I'm not planning to stay here more than a semester or two whatever I told them?"

"The point is to foster an environment of learning.

"Well, no, the point is capitalism.  But the ideal is to foster an environment of learning.

"And there's reasons to branch outside your discipline at least a little bit.

"One only has to look at the techbro-to-fascism pipeline to see why you can't neglect the humanities, especially as regards civics.  ...My mother was, albeit that this was decades ago, hired as a computer programmer because she plays music.

"And - not everyone can do the experiments, but that doesn't mean that only the people who do the experiments should get to benefit from the knowledge of what was done.

"Plus, project managers exist and that skillset benefits greatly from being conversant in the field they're managing but cannot devote their time to doing it because their job is makimg sure everyone else does it, you know?"

Aeslin has no idea what that pipeline to fascism is, and only a vague sense of what a "project manager" is (maybe the same thing she calls a team-chamberlain?), but that's not the response that's boiling over inside her.

"Well yeah, of course people need to know all sorts of things, but if they aren't studying for themselves by twenty-two then something's gone really wrong with your culture!  Now I'm not saying mage education is that great either, but our general group-classroom schools let out around age sixteen... and I'm not saying everyone gets a great education after then, but a lot of people do keep on studying - apprenticeships and tutorials and such - and they've got more drive and curiosity because they're needing to study for themselves!"

She throws up her hands.

"Of course, maybe it's just because most of us aren't studying chemistry and physics and computers and everything like that.  Maybe you've just got a lot more to learn.

"Or maybe it's primary school all over again and I've landed in a classroom that works fine for the people who don't go studying for themselves, and... who knows, maybe there's something else I haven't heard about for the people who do?"

"...I think that if you would like a hug, I would like to give you a hug, because dear gods now that I think about it I know what that pain feels like.  I still fondly remember my first grade English teacher because she was the only teacher I can recall giving me a spelling list of words I wasn't practically guaranteed to already know.  To say nothing of the 'fourth-grade math class claiming squares aren't rectangles' debacle.  ...There kind of are schools that try to do things that don't...  I don't want to say 'drag everyone along at the pace of the lowest common denominator and not actually teach anyone who isn't learning how to learn to learn how to learn', but...  Okay, I do want to say that, actually!  But they're not universally available, nor even distributed sensibly!"

"...Fuck, now I want to go on a rant about the - Muggle, I suppose - education system.  Because it's fucking failed me, and by the time I achieved enough metacognition to notice it was too fucking late.  And - as much as I'm still hanging on by the skin of my teeth because I'm technically still here right now, I know I'm reaching the peak of a parabolic trajectory of attainment because I was never taught - how to manage myself?  How to build a support structure for the things I just can't do?  Except that that's not really...

"It's the assumed-neurotypicality of it all that's left me floundering - both me, and you, I dare suspect, because - you remind me of me, and I know my brain's not stock.  I was taught the wrong things for the wrong reasons, and skills I need and still don't fucking have aren't even taught in schools, especially to a gifted child," she all but literally spits.

"I just.  There's so much that even my ability to string words together meaningfully is just utterly imploding at the task!"