Given the excess of applicants and the lower bar to teach the remedial courses, I only scheduled a handful of stops for interviews, rather than traveling as much during this break. Last time I was meticulous about who I selected, and honestly, it didn't matter much in the grand scheme of things. So, I shorted my time away from the academy significantly as a result. It did at least feel like this break involved less work than the summer one, which is either a good sign that we've started to figure things out, or a bad sign that there is something unanticipated that is going to cause problems next semester. Only time will tell.

I also got a bit lucky that I was able to fill the additional positions that we devised during last semester, which brings our total instructor count up to 43. Unlike with the initial instructors that I hired, I hired less support staff as accompaniment. Not only did we figure out that the amount of support we hired initially was overkill, but I also anticipate that remedial courses shouldn't need as much assistance, since the instructors won't be expected to have their own research that they complete in parallel to teaching. Of course, right now, no one is getting any additional research done, but I'm hoping that this might change a little over next break.

The incoming student body had slightly more demons than last time. The incoming class also had an interesting divide in who needed what for remedial courses. The demons needed a lot of remedial courses related to dwarves, but none of them needed remedial courses on anything that could be found around Kembora, whether it be agriculture, engineering, or business. Incoming dwarves didn't need any remedial courses related to their heritage, but any given dwarf needed one or more remedial courses in the other fields.

We were already splitting them up to accommodate our limited number of translators, which made this not much of a problem in and of itself. What I didn't really anticipate, but probably should have, was a natural group bias that started to form. People were keeping to their own species and not mingling at any point. Due to the dwarves outnumbering the demons this often led to discrimination, though occasionally it would go the other way with demons picking on dwarves in certain classes.

Since the first class had been selected due to how docile they were, we hadn't really run into this as a problem, possibly due to there being even fewer demons, and everyone just being generally frustrated with the academy as a whole, giving them a common enemy of sorts. The new batch of students, however, didn't have the same selective bias, and considering many of the dwarves probably have actually horrifying memories of demons attacking their homes personally, I'm more surprised that the first class didn't have any major incidents.

I had intended for this to be a place to remove those prejudices, but it currently is doing more to inflame them instead. After some discussion with faculty, I've realized two things. First, many of the dwarves and a few of the demons are just letting it slide. They've been considering it as the natural way of things. To be honest, given how long the history between demon invasions and dwarves has been, it kind of has been the natural way of things. We can't just tell them not to do it though, because that just harbors resentment, they have to willingly stop.

Konkur was the one who had the best idea for us to try. He pointed out, rightfully, that what built up the political connection between Kembora and the dwarves was a sense of mutual assistance towards common goals. So he proposed we try to emulate that in some way. What we ended up coming up with was the idea of implementing a club structure overseen by faculty. For this semester, we'll have to just prevent things from getting out of hand as we gather info, design, and build out everything that we need for it. We've started to develop a questionnaire to go out to the student body to see exactly what clubs people would be interested in.

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Certain ones should be easy for things like hiking, fishing, or even geology. They shouldn't require much infrastructure to support them. Others, however, could end up requiring constructed spaces, so we'll have to prioritize construction as needed for that. Clubs reducing animosity should work in theory, as long as it doesn't turn out that the hobbies themselves also end up naturally segregated. Historically though, there was quite a bit of overlap between dwarven pastimes and demon ones. Plenty of demons enjoyed going fishing and gambling, sometimes to a fanatical degree, so I expect that at least some clubs will work in our favor.

After we got the results from the club questionnaires, we started the work of prioritization and organization. Some clubs needed little work to be done outside of sourcing equipment. Those clubs were basically immediately green lit, and equipment sourcing began. This even applied to clubs that would only have single digits numbers of members. A few clubs are going to require quite a bit of infrastructure, however. There are a few hobby sports that dwarves partake in that would require some construction work. The dwarven faculty insisted that no construction would be necessary for them, as pretty much all dwarves are used to playing these sports in rough terrain.

So those clubs will at least be available before construction is done on what I'd consider proper play fields for their sports. Part of the benefit of having a properly constructed field for any sport is making the sport itself safer and more enjoyable, so I insisted that we plan on building the fields out at some point. Since the dwarves have ways of making standard blocks with their magic, their regulations on certain sizes of balls is actually quite strict for their sports, which is surprising. Since they're also used to being in valleys, many of the sports actually are designed around asymmetric playstyles involving uphill and downhill sides.

According to the faculty, some of the fun is in playing with other villages, and getting to play on different field layouts. That complicates the construction somewhat, but it also opens up certain opportunities for cooperation between dwarves and demons. Demons with stoneshaping have a bit more freedom in the kinds of stone constructions we can make, which could open up opportunities for these clubs to work with demons to create unique playing fields.

Other clubs, however, will require infrastructure to be built immediately. One such club is pottery, which there is a fairly large amount of interest in according to our survey. They'll need pottery wheels and kilns in addition to a space to work in and store supplies. Similarly, there is some interest in both agricultural and animal husbandry as club activities, and both of those will require some amount of infrastructure. I shouldn't have really been surprised that a large amount of the students, who are largely comprised of adults, see clubs as an opportunity for some familiarity to work on the same sort of job they worked on before coming here.

That unfortunately also means that most of those clubs will require infrastructure to be functional. A few of the faculty have proposed that part of their club activities can be making the tools they'll need for their clubs, which I thought was an interesting idea. For some of the clubs, I think it could be implemented partially. For example, building their own kilns for pottery. However, I still believe that anything that needs to be structurally sound should be built by professionals. I do still think it'd be beneficial for at least one main kiln to be built by professionals as well for pottery, just in case their homemade kiln doesn't work.

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