~Dolion~

james potter teaches spanish and half the school is emotionally invested in his ongoing failure to win over miss evans from english. his year ten class has an actual betting pool on whether he’ll finally ask her out before christmas, easter, or never. he tries to casually mention poetry around her and gets bullied by fourteen-year-olds for it immediately.

lily evans teaches english and her students suffer most during poetry because she cares so much. she’ll be standing at the front like “what does the enjambment suggest?” while thirty teenagers silently experience despair. she is strict, terrifyingly organised, and absolutely catches every single student using chatgpt for their essay before they even finish lying.

peter pettigrew teaches dt and somehow has at least one near-death experience per week. saws, drills, glue guns, falling shelves, loose screws, mysterious sparks. he laughs all of it off like “haha, close one” while the students are staring at him like sir, you nearly lost a finger.

remus lupin teaches history and assigns way too much homework. he’s chill in the way tired teachers are chill, but his version of a “small task” is three pages of source analysis and a timeline. students either love him because he explains things properly or hate him because he remembers every deadline they hoped he’d forget.

sirius black teaches drama despite being unable to act. he is dramatic, yes. good at acting, no. he spends most lessons criticising students like he’s judging the national theatre, then performs an example so terrible the whole class goes silent out of second-hand embarrassment. still, the students love him because his lessons are chaos and he absolutely lets them overdo stage fights.

marlene mckinnon teaches music and everyone in the rooms nearby hates her. the walls shake. the drums are never quiet. someone is always badly learning guitar. she says things like “feel the rhythm” to year eights who have never felt anything except fear. half her students want to start bands. the other half just want earplugs.

mary macdonald teaches textiles and makes little things for her favourite students. she pretends she doesn’t have favourites, but everyone knows. if she likes you, you might randomly get a little embroidered patch or a repaired blazer sleeve. if she doesn’t like you, your bobbin is suddenly your own problem.

alice fortescue teaches food tech and is always covered in ingredients. flour on her cheek, chocolate on her sleeve, icing sugar in her hair, somehow still smiling. she has a powerful alliance with the lunch ladies, which means she knows everything happening in the school before SLT does. nothing escapes the food tech kitchen.

frank longbottom teaches maths and the students fall asleep every lesson, not because he’s bad, but because he is so gentle and calm that his classroom feels like a nap sanctuary. he explains algebra like he’s soothing a frightened animal. half his year elevens are failing quietly but feel very emotionally supported about it.

fabian prewett teaches physics and once broke a window during a lesson. he insists it was a valuable practical demonstration about force. nobody believes him. his lessons are genuinely interesting, but there is always a fifty-fifty chance something will fly across the room and become a safeguarding issue.

gideon prewett teaches biology and once slipped on a dissection frog during a lesson. he still claims the frog moved. students bring it up constantly. he’s good at biology in a weirdly enthusiastic way, but he absolutely has jars in his classroom that nobody should be looking at for too long.

regulus black teaches pe and terrifies the students who also adore him. he runs every sports club because nobody else can be trusted to do it properly. football, netball, athletics, swimming, cross country, badminton, whatever. he has a whistle and a death stare and can make an entire year nine class line up silently in under ten seconds. students act like he’s terrifying, then fight to be picked for his teams.

dorcas meadowes teaches geography and is completely no-nonsense. she does not tolerate messing around with atlases. she does not care that you “forgot” your homework. she will make you label rivers until you regret being born. her classroom is calm because everyone is slightly afraid to breathe incorrectly.

barty crouch jr teaches art and has multiple pieces of art of mr (regulus) black in his classroom, which makes his students lose their minds. sketches, paintings, weird dramatic charcoal studies, one suspiciously romantic watercolour. every class has tried to ask about it. every class has regretted asking. he is a terrifying art teacher because he will roast your shading and then tell you to express your trauma through acrylic.

evan rosier teaches french and refuses to speak or let students speak anything but french during lessons. students walk in and immediately lose access to english. someone asks to borrow a pen in english and he just stares until they try again. everyone hates it for the first month and then somehow ends up actually learning french out of pure survival instinct.

pandora rosier teaches chemistry and there have been many incidents. not accidents. incidents. she says this distinction matters. the students love her because every lesson feels like it might become illegal. there have been strange smells, coloured flames, one evacuation, and at least one beaker that nobody can prove became sentient.

anyway who do we think teaches the other subjects?

who’s got media studies? who’s suffering through computer science? who’s teaching health and social care like they’re one bad day from quitting? who gets business studies? religious studies? psychology? sociology? dance? citizenship? politics? classics? photography?

they meet by complete accident on the streets of london while sirius is there on a school trip. sirius spots remus smoking outside a corner shop and, without knowing a single word of english, decides he’s going to bum a cigarette off him anyway. it takes an embarrassing amount of pointing, miming, fake smoking motions and increasingly dramatic hand gestures before remus finally figures out what this very animated french boy wants. he starts off trying not to laugh, but sirius looks so painfully determined to get his point across that remus caves and hands him a cigarette.

they end up standing there together for the next twenty minutes.

sirius talks the entire time in rapid-fire french, complaining about his teacher who only gave them thirty minutes of free time around carnaby street, about how impossible it is to keep up with his class, about london, about anything that comes to mind. he knows remus doesn’t understand a single sentence, but remus keeps nodding anyway, smiling whenever sirius gets especially dramatic with his hands, replying with the occasional “yeah?” like he’s somehow following along

neither of them understands the other, but somehow they’re still having a conversation.

eventually sirius’s classmates start calling for him from down the street. remus pats his pockets, finds a pen, gently takes sirius’s hand and writes his address across the back of it. then he taps the ink with his finger, mimes writing on paper, and points in the vague direction of france.

“send me a letter.”

sirius doesn’t understand the words but he understands everything else.

and

Most of all he hates that he has to stay away from James: Alpha, his best friend, and the secret love of his life.

That all changes when James comes home early, finds Sirius desperate and begging, declares his undying love, and mates him without hesitation.

Here’s a quick handy reference list or anyone who isn’t sure:

Homosexuality does exist in almost all social species.

“Alpha males” are not a real phenomenon and in fact the most aggressive males tend to be the least reproductively successful.

“Survival of the fittest” simply means that the success of a species hinges on how well it “fits” its environment. It does not mean that stronger or smarter individuals are supposed to succeed. Those things can even be a detriment in nature by wasting too many resources.

“Race” is not a biological concept. Someone who looks different from you has the same human genes, just a different grab-bag of dominant traits.

Evolution is not a march towards higher complexity, more intelligence or even more adaptability. It’s just a fluctuation of characteristics dictated by environmental pressures and mutation. A slime mold isn’t “less evolved” than a hawk, just adapted for success under different parameters.

People didn’t evolve “from apes.” It’s more complicated than that. We are a category of ape, sharing a common ancestor with the other apes.

No human on Earth is “closer” to an evolutionary ancestor than any other. We all descended from the same one.

Neanderthals were also a “sibling” species of ours. We didn’t evolve from them.

Humans are actually more genetically homogeneous than most people suspect. This is possibly due to a population bottleneck at some point in our evolutionary past. Two chimpanzees from different sides of a jungle are likely more genetically different to each other than any two human beings in the world.

Our big brains may help us use tools, but what was really principal in their development was the need for empathy, communication, and cooperation.

Humans. Are. Social. So social it drove an incredibly energetically costly increase in our brain size.  Don’t believe anyone who says its our nature to fight “every man for themself.” We’re humans, not bears. We fight for each other.

And we always have. Fossil remains are found of ancient humans who bore signs of crucial mobility impairments that lived to notable ages. Some even have sticks or other mobility aids – community care and support is our way. We don’t cast off those with impairments, we stand by them.

Human sexual dimorphism is on a decreasing trend. Our ancestors had greater difference in canine size and overall size. Our dimorphism gap has gotten smaller.

Occam’s razor is the principal that whatever is the simplest explanation is probably the most likely one. Don’t believe someone who says the reason we evolved bipedalism is so that males could carry gifts to females to woo them. Yes, this is a real ‘theory’ on how bipedalism evolved.

Skin tone is an adaptation of UV levels vs vitamin D levels. Both come from the sun. UV is harmful, so where sun is plentiful populations develop a darker skin tone for more protection. The skin needs sun to create vitamin D, so where sun is scarce, the skin tone lightens to allow more sun in. This is literally all it is.

Final thing: No one’s mind is really equipped to fully understand how long a billion years is, or a million, or even tens of thousands of years. Evolution takes place over a loooong time. Its very, very, slow, slower than we can really comprehend. We can’t “stand in the way” of natural selection by caring for our ill. We don’t need to “help” evolution in any way. It inevitably happens, but not on any sort of timescale we could possibly affect, so don’t fall for anyone that tells you not to “stand in the way” of natural selection. That’s fascism, and its utterly pseudo-scientific.