Sybill is keenly aware that Divination is not something that can be taught in the traditional sense. While students can learn to understand portents, and better grasp symbolism through the study of various texts on the subject, for the most part she considers the tools of the trade to be finicky at the best of times to downright hoaxes at the worst.
While she is very firm on the studies of palmistry and tarot due to the fact both of these tools are in a sense more scientifically rooted and designed to serve as guides rather than prophecies, she considers tasseography to be something of a joke. While there are hedgewitches and true diviners who might utilize the tool, Sybill doesn’t really consider it to be the strongest indicator of the third eye available and honestly uses it more to test the children on their capacity to recognize symbols and signify their meanings accurately.
The same can be said of capnomancy and libanomancy ( divination via smoke / incense ) which are taught in later years. Again Sybill focuses more on what her students think they see and how they interpret those signals. It is however usually here that she will pick up on students that may truly have the gift, and will begin to nurture them more directly with private side courses where her demeanor is remarkably altered. When it comes to true diviners, Sybill does not mess around, for their sake and the sake of everyone else.
Scrying and pallomancy are also elements that are for later years – while she will introduce scrying via crystal ball as early as third year, again her tests are more along the lines of teaching students to recognize and correctly interpret symbols, as often times prophetic matters reveal themselves to young witches and wizards through dreams and visions that the lack of recognition causes to go unnoticed. Pallomancy is something that she considers a genuine art, and will be far more critical of than most other matters in the course.
Due to the fact the better majority of her class is designed to look at symbology through various methodologies, to break things down and interpret them, Sybill honestly tends to consider herself something of a creative arts teacher since most of the time, her students need to make things up in order to start ‘divining’ anything at all. Which means Harry Potter and Ronald Weasley were in fact doing their homework correctly, while thinking they were just joking around.
Sybill genuinely enjoyed their work and would curve upwards for creativity and jot down notes on their papers only when interpretations were grossly misread. Otherwise, she considered them to be among her favorite students, as surely as Lavender and Parvati, the latter of whom Sybill truly believed had a genuine gift and would later take on into the more genuine coursework for managing prophetic visions.
One thing Harry and Ron might have noticed though, would be sometimes they would get their papers back and the handwriting would be different. All their work, but written in a clear and steady hand – this would be the result of Sybill accidentally handing them the translated version of their homework, as their writing styles tended to be genuinely impossible for her to read, so she tended to simply transfer their work with a spell to another parchment. They’re not the only victims of this, but it has lead to a few mixed returns.
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