Bad Education
is a Harry Potter fanfiction written by magicspacehole, set five years after Tom Riddle graduated from Hogwarts. Armando Dippet is still Headmaster and the position for Defense Against the Dark Arts is still open, so Riddle decides to reapply for the job. In doing so, he hopes to continue his search for artifacts that he can turn into Horcruxes and recruit impressionable young minds to the Dark Side. Only, this time, he actually gets the job.
As the above quote implies, Riddle soon realizes that having a full-time teaching job involves a lot more than he expected. Like making lesson plans, earning the respect of colleagues who think he's too young for the job, controlling unruly students, and monitoring study hall. Hilarity Ensues.
This fanfiction contain examples of the following tropes:
- Be Careful What You Wish For: It's established in the books that Voldemort really wanted the Defense Against the Dark Arts teaching position. It's established in this fanfiction that getting that position really wouldn't have gone the way he planned.
- Brick Joke: At the beginning of Chapter 5, Tom has successfully changed the study hall schedule so that Dumbledore has most of the shifts for the week. Later on, he becomes the victim of a prank by Gryffindor students and demands that Dumbledore find the perpetrators and punish them. Dumbledore says he won't have the time because he'll be too busy monitoring study hall.
- Compliment Backfire: Riddle's early attempts to charm McGonagall tend to go this way
- Conditioned to Accept Horror: The Hogwarts staff and administration are largely indifferent to a couple of students mysteriously disappearing because disasters are more or less expected at magic schools.
- Cool and Unusual Punishment: Tom talks Slughorn into giving him the job of arranging the study hall monitor schedule and vows to sic that responsibility on any teacher who annoys him. But it tends to backfire on him.
- Didn't Think This Through: The entire premise of the fic. Riddle never considered that teaching at Hogwarts would have to involve, well, teaching.
- Evil Is Petty: Tom Riddle, in what seems to be a Call-Forward to his time as
- Evil Versus Evil: Tom is no saint, but he’s the more heroic of the pair in his feud with Cornelia.
- Hot Teacher: Quite a few students are more interested in Tom's appearance than anything he's got to say about Defense Against the Dark Arts, much to his dismay.
- Intoxication Ensues: Tom swears he only had one drink at Slughorn's Halloween party in Chapter 8. He had eight.
- Not Me This Time: When Tom explains to McGonagall that he isn't dating a student, he notes to himself that he's glad she believes him, because this had to be one of the few times that he wasn't lying about something.
- Once Done, Never Forgotten: Tom keeps having to fend off rumors that he's dating a student named Hester Hopkirk. note
- Villain Protagonist: The result of having Tom Riddle, the future Lord Voldemort, as the hero.
