As you all know, magic can be a very dangerous business. Everyone of us might find himself in a situation where they are confronted with a dark wizard, or a creature he created, or just the undesirable effects of dark magic. Lets call a situation like this "having a problem." What we need to find out first of all is: what kind of problem are we having.
There are three possibilities:

1) Somebody else's problems (SEPs). For example, there are still some vampires roaming in the forests of the Carpathians. They are a risk for the local population, but you do not have to worry. Many of my colleagues already take care of the problem. Nobody expects first year students to help.

2) Problems that solve themselves. For example: if you get bad marks for this first assignment you don not need to worry. You will have plenty of opportunities to make up for it and, anyway, I will probably have forgotten it by the end of the year.

3) Problems that require immediate action. Sometimes you will have to fight. More about this later.

The art lies in recognizing the difference (this is true for every situation in life). And this is where most mistakes are made. E.g., you might think you are dealing with an SEP and do not care about, but this peculiar somebody actually relies on you. This person will be quite disappointed.
Or, you interfere with something you had better left alone. You might see, e.g., the necessity to inform me about a student dishonestly handing in a crib of a fellow student's homework instead of an own work. If you should do so I will teach you that this was the wrong decision. This is a SEP.

What enables us to make decisions? Our experience and our knowledge. We all made the experience that fire is hot and will burn us. If our steak drops into the charcoal we won't try to get it out with our bare hands. Experience let us make this decision. And we would not swim in a crocodile-infested river, although none of us has yet been bitten by a crocodile. This decision we owe to our knowledge. Knowledge is other people's experience - provided they survived to teach us.
There are two problems about knowledge:

1) Those who teach us may not have made the experience themselves but have been taught by teachers who also have been taught and so on. As it is possible that no one made a particular experience for a long time, there is no way of knowing whether the knowledge is actually still valid. There are perfectly harmless crocodiles - and there are crocodiles you should not only avoid taking a bath in their river but also keep well away from their riverbank. Other people's experience can also be very unreliable. Just because Pizza makes me horribly sick doesn't mean it has the same effect on you. My esteemed colleague Mooney devours two for breakfast alone.

2) Knowledge passed on over generations from teacher to pupil and from parent to child often becomes distorted. If everybody changes just a tiny little detail, in the end it will become something completely different. During my researches about this I found out that the famous saying "When in Rome do as the Romans do" originally went like this: "When in Rome, don't eat tomato soup!" Because what the Romans serve to tourists is nothing but a cheap disgusting sludge. The transformation of the saying was part of a very clever marketing strategy of the Italian ministry of tourism.

So lets keep in mind: personal experience is better than other's. Whenever we have to rely on other people's experience we need to carefully ask ourselves how reliable our source is. That is even true for everything I'm going to teach you, so be alert!!!
So much about epistemology for today. Don't worry, you don't have to know what the word means. Finding out, however, may gain you a bonus. The same goes for the following questions - answer them if you want to but you don't have to.
Because Muggles don't practice magic they have a lot of time for philosophy. Some of their greatest thinkers have dealt with questions of cognition and even questioned the reliability of our senses and therefore our own experience.
Questions: What is Plato's parable of the cave about?
Who said "cogito ergo sum" and what does it mean?
If you think you are hyper intelligent and really want to do this: What is the theory of constructivism about? But be careful - this is very hard stuff.

And now: Practice!
Next time we will deal with werewolves, and after that it's going to be vampires. Your assignment for the time untill then is: find out as much as you can about werewolves. But don't get carried away: most stuff you will find is quite wrong. The only really true fact is: they are dogs. They think and feel and act like dogs. So find out about dogs!
In my class no harm will come to any werewolf. They are sensible creatures like us and amongst them are some of our most honourable fellow wizards. So think about how to deal with a werewolf non-violently. It's basically the same as with bad-mannered dogs: so if you really know about dogs (even the big black hairy ones) you well be okay with werewolves too.
Please do not write anything untill I tell you and do not try to send me any homework. I will post it when there is homework to be done.