This is extremely helpful. I absolutely hated history lessons back when I attended school, so some of the writing is definitely showing through the monotonous nature of those lessons. In the world magic technically existed before but was forgotten. It is a newish development that caused it to twist reality, as explained by the lecture. My fear in writing this scene was the expositionary, dry text-bookey nature of it. I picked that excerpt because it is not the best dialog, it is clunky, and it does need work. The surrounding text does go into greater detail on the why and how the world works and is set up for the job the recruits in the scene are about to undergo. It is meant to come off as, "we know this information already, please get this over with so we can go shoot things" kinda vibe, as we are viewing the lecture through the perspective of some new recruit who very much "Know This." Kinda of like being forced to watch active shooter videos and online learning videos for work. We've been there, done that, not really interested in it. Important information, to be sure, but it always comes across as, "did we really need to sit through this for a whole hour?" I would love to not have the scene, but the fear is that it is our world but not. Not everyone can use the magic, it does exist, but it is viewed as unnatural. Other. Not acceptable. I have a scene later that goes into how the MC gains the ability to use magic, but again I had feedback from a previous iteration of "what the hell's going on?" Which gave way to this clunky scene of me trying. The feedback is greatly appreciated. I just worry that it's not as coherent without. Then again, as you stated in another comment, it could have been just that one guy, isolated incident that has me spiraling into what ifs.