Light novels and their adjacent media forms don't have a great track record when it comes to stories about teachers and students. You're much more likely to find works that play out the teacher/student romance fantasy or the hot school nurse daydream than anything more realistic. Even works focused on just the teachers tend to play to the romance angle. That was my concern with this series initially because quite frankly the scenario is ripe for it: a young male high school teacher suddenly finds himself working in a school filled with nubile young demi-humans working towards becoming full-fledged humans. The potential for shenanigans is high.

That, as it turns out, is not what A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans is about. The teacher in question, twenty-nine-year-old Rei Hitoma, repulses any attempts by his students to tease or tempt him, and he spends most of these books nursing a mild crush on a fellow teacher that serves as window dressing more than an actual plot point. Although there is a light attempt at setting up a way to circumvent Rei's stated distaste for getting involved with underage girls towards the end of the first volume, the whole romance angle isn't a fixture of the books, with even a love-obsessed dragon in volume two being quickly explained away. Instead, the main thrust of the plot is that Rei must work with his students to help them graduate into full humanity while coping with the emotional fallout from his previous teaching job, which left him with a dim view of humanity in general and students in particular.

We don't learn much about what happened roughly three years before the start of the story. We don't need to know; that it happened and traumatized Rei badly enough that he left teaching (and working) entirely is more than enough to set the stage, although the ending of book two does imply that it will come back into prominence in the third novel. That he hasn't fully given up on whatever investment in education made him become a teacher in the first place is clear from the fact that he applies for the new job – and accepts when it's offered to him. There's some sense that he's at least a little relieved to find out that he'll be working with nonhuman students, even as he questions whether helping them to be human is something he can do or that they ought to aspire to.

Placed in charge of the advanced class of students approaching graduation, Rei's group consists of Kyouka Minazuki (mermaid), Tobari Haneda (bullheaded shrike), Sui Usami (rabbit), and Isaki Oogami (reverse werewolf) in the first volume, with the addition of Neneko Kurosawa (black cat), Machi Nezu (mouse) and the aforementioned dragon in the second. Each girl has a reason for wanting to become human, and they all get their own chapters. While each is good, the absolute strongest chapter across the books is Usami's, which achieves a depth of emotion that the others can't capture, although Neneko's comes close. While it mostly focuses on her specific reasons for wanting to be human and humans' expiration dates, it also quietly shows Rei that maybe being human isn't such a bad thing. Usami is the prickliest of the girls in the class, and that turns out to be her way of both coping with her own emotions and her drive to successfully complete her course of study. Usami knows that if she stops to think she might fall apart, and that becomes beautifully clear in her story. Her determination helps Rei to see beyond his own experience, making the chapter the perfect crystallization of the novel's point.

Oogami's story is equally important on this front but it's also the least creative. One of the three mythological creatures in class, Oogami is a wolf who turns human once a month, and that's always made her feel like she doesn't belong with her family. She came to school to essentially excise one of her two halves, and her human side believes that it's her. This is because Full Moon Oogami and regular Oogami are opposite personalities – where the latter is shy, the former is outgoing and into makeup, fashion, and social media. As a way to show how the two are different, this works very well, although as I mentioned it's not difficult to guess that the driving force of Oogami's storyline is for her to accept both halves of herself as part of a singular whole. This works towards helping Rei to realize that he can be both the person he was before and after his trauma, with his experiences not stopping him dead in his tracks, but simply offering a different direction for him to grow in. It is well done, particularly its finale in the second novel. It's just not as striking as Usami's story or even the way Kyouka incorporates elements of the original Little Mermaid literary fairy tale.

Natsume Kurusu's writing is generally good, and there's always a sense of purpose behind it. Some chapters seem to incorporate elements that don't fit with the overall story, and that turns out to be because the author solicited suggestions of things to incorporate from their social media followers, which as you can imagine doesn't always work out for the story's advantage; the breast-groping scene in volume two doesn't fit or need to be there. Sai Izumi's art is very clean and has just the right level of fanservice – mostly leaving it in the color pages and not using it to distract from the plot in the interior illustrations.

A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans gets more right than you might expect. It does a nice job showing how teachers and students can engage in mutual learning, creates an interesting world, and is at times genuinely emotional. It won't scratch the itch if you're looking for more typical monster girl fiction, but if you're in the mood for a good school-set story, this is it.