Rather than bickering about the definition of a class/lecture/course and whether it is the best way to do things, how about finding practical suggestions for the original poster to approach his situation?
I already said I don't think it can be done, but that I could also be wrong, and I'd like to hear how it goes.
Then people got up in arms about how top professionals give lectures, and somebody posted a bunch of crap from the dictionary. That's not productive, but it betrays a misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding needs to be corrected.
My advice - if you want it - is
not to do this class. I think it will do more harm than good. I believe you would be better off selecting a few individuals to teach in one-on-one sessions yourself, and sending others to learn from other area magicians who have expressed an interest in teaching the
next generation of magicians.
I don't think you're going to take my advice, and to be perfectly honest, I wouldn't take it either. If I thought something was a good idea, and someone told me it would never work, I'd try it anyway. There are always people saying it will never work, and most of them don't know squat.
The reason I say you can't teach magic in a classroom setting is simply that the field is too large. You may have one person who wants to learn card tricks, and another who doesn't know flourishes aren't really magic, and another who wants to saw people in half, and another who just thinks cups and balls would be the coolest thing. Expand that out to thirty people, and you can't cover what everyone wants to know at all - let alone give them sufficient background to continue pursuing it.
Even if you restrict the class to card tricks, the environment is bad. A community of a few hundred people - like a school - cannot support several dozen magicians. Each of them can perform each trick for maybe a half dozen people, and then everyone's seen it. If one of them screws up and exposes the trick, the
whole class has the trick ruined. The small community size
requires that the students race one another to perform for an audience before everyone's already seen the trick, and the consequences of racing - the likelihood of exposure - are felt by all the competitors. Once one student races too fast, performs too early, and blows the trick... everybody loses. That trick, and all the time and effort you put into it, doesn't play for this audience anymore.
This situation is aggravated by the simple fact that many of the kids attracted to a class like this will be competitive and socially inept. They think that if they could only do some card tricks, they could be popular - and that would show those dumb jocks on the football team. They see card tricks as a way to make friends, rather than just look like a dork, the way it generally turns out. When reality doesn't match up with their dreams, they need specific and individualised instruction - both to correct their fantasy world, bringing it closer to reality, and to identify the reasons their performance didn't align with their intentions. Without that, they frequently leave the field in disgust, and may even start resenting the very existence of other magicians.
My single greatest concern with respect to these two issues is that the educator giving the class will simply throw up his hands and say "what happens outside of this class is not my problem". Then you have trick exposure ruining the audience while bad experiences are ruining potential magicians, and the damage done is simply irreparable.
I do not believe these problems are insurmountable. I simply cannot see any way to solve them. If you think you can solve them, that's fantastic, and I look forward to hearing about it. But if you haven't even thought about them, you're already in trouble even before the class starts.
Notice that none of the problems I've identified are true of the lectures given at magic conventions. Everyone attending such a lecture knows exactly what he's there to learn, will not be trying to take his newfound knowledge into the same community as the other attendees, and brings his own unique blend of experiences and preferences to the performance in any case. It's simply a different animal.
