Harry Potter Professor Picker
Which card did you get?
Professors in the box
Tap a professor to put their pack on the table (up to 12 — all of them fit at once).
Choose which teachers are in the box, then tear a pack open. The frog gets exactly one bounce before it is gone — what matters is the card it leaves behind, and a line on what that professor is actually like to be taught by.
- Fanfic and roleplay
- Lesson prompts
- Group cosplay
A random Hogwarts professor, out of a card pack
The Harry Potter Professor Picker chooses one of twelve Hogwarts teachers at random — but instead of spinning a wheel at a list, you tear open a sealed collectible pack. A shine moves across the table, one pack is chosen, the wrapper splits, the frog springs out and is gone in a single bounce, and the card it leaves behind turns over to your professor.
How it works
Tap the professors you want in play. All twelve fit at once.
A shine travels the table and slows to a stop on one sealed pack.
The wrapper tears, the frog bounces once and hops out of frame.
Your professor is on the face, with a line on their lessons.
The twelve professors, and what their lessons are like
Every card comes with a line of description, because "you got Binns" is a name and "has been dead for years and has not noticed" is a lesson you can picture. This is the full staff list, along with the object that stands in for each of them on the card.
| Professor | Subject | On the card | In one line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Umbridge | Defence Against the Dark Arts | A teacup | Sweetness used as a weapon. Pink decor, run like a prison. |
| Sprout | Herbology | A mandrake root | Practical, muddy and unbothered. Never needs to raise her voice. |
| Flitwick | Charms | A music note | Delighted by his subject, and just as delighted when you get it. |
| Trelawney | Divination | A crystal ball | Predicts doom every lesson. Right about twice, which is twice more than expected. |
| Slughorn | Potions | A pineapple | Collects promising students like sweets. Vain, generous, good company. |
| Quirrell | Defence Against the Dark Arts | A turban | Nervous and hiding something. The quietest person is rarely the safest. |
| Lockhart | Defence Against the Dark Arts | An award rosette | All teeth and book deals. Has never done the things he wrote about. |
| Madam Hooch | Flying | A whistle | Fair, sharp-eyed and done with cheating. Whistles before you have landed. |
| Professor Binns | History of Magic | A scroll | Has been dead for years and has not noticed. Neither, by half past, have you. |
| Firenze | Divination | A bow | Teaches by looking up, and answers in riddles because nobody really knows. |
| Professor Vector | Arithmancy | An abacus | Numbers, not nonsense. Hardest marker in the castle, and the fairest. |
| Professor Sinistra | Astronomy | A telescope | Midnight lessons up the tower. Quietly the best classroom in the school. |
Why five famous names are missing
Dumbledore, Snape, McGonagall, Lupin and Mad-Eye Moody all taught at Hogwarts, and none of them is on this page. They sit on the HP Character Picker instead.
Having the same five names on both pages made each one worse. The character picker without them is missing its most recognisable results; the professor picker with them is a page where five entries dominate and the actual teaching staff barely get a look in. Splitting them gives each page a job: one asks who, the other asks who is taking your lesson. What was left here was then grown back out to twelve with the rest of the staff room — Hooch, Binns, Firenze, Vector and Sinistra — so this is a fuller timetable than it was before, not a thinner one.
The Defence Against the Dark Arts problem
Three of the twelve — Umbridge, Quirrell and Lockhart — taught the same subject, and that is not an accident of this list. The Defence post famously never keeps anyone for longer than a year, and the people it attracts are a fraud, a nervous wreck and a bureaucrat with a taste for cruelty.
It makes the draw genuinely funnier than a flat list of teachers would be. A quarter of your results are someone who should not have been allowed near a classroom, which is roughly the historical accuracy rate.
Ways people use it
Writing a lesson scene
Draw a teacher and write their class. The subject and the temperament together give you the scene's whole shape before you have written a line.
Tabletop and fan RPGs
Roll for whoever is supervising tonight. It changes the entire risk profile of a plan when the answer turns out to be Umbridge.
Group cosplay
One draw each from the same list. Staff costumes are far less contested than the students, and nobody ends up with a leftover.
Quiz and trivia rounds
Draw a professor, then ask the table what they taught and what happened to them. The obscure ones are where the good questions live.
Settling an argument
Best teacher, worst teacher, who you would actually want as head of house. Start from a random card rather than everyone's favourite.
Rewatches
Take a professor each and watch a film tracking only them. The staff are doing far more in the background than you remember.
Why a card pack and not a wheel
A wheel puts you in charge — you grab it, you spin it, you aim it at an outcome. A sealed pack does the opposite. You do not know what is inside, you only get to open it once, and the frog is gone before you can do anything about it.
That is the right shape for a collectible: the card is a thing you were given, not a thing you chose. Underneath, the randomness is identical to a wheel — one uniform pick made before anything moves — but the moment of finding out is a reveal rather than a deceleration.
Why the artwork has no faces
Every drawing on this page is original, and that rules out portraits — drawing a recognisable version of these characters means copying a likeness that belongs to someone else. So each professor is a plain object from their own subject instead: a telescope, an abacus, a whistle, a crystal ball.
It suits a collectible card better than a face would anyway. Subject objects tell you what the lesson is before you have read the name, and a row of twelve of them reads as a set you could actually collect.
A shortlist beats the whole staff room. Twelve professors means each one comes up about one run in twelve. If you are choosing something you have to live with — a costume, a character to write for a month — cut the table down to the four or five you would genuinely be pleased to draw.
A fair pick, every time
The winning pack is drawn with your browser's cryptographic random generator before the shine moves, and the sweep is then built to finish there. Professors are shuffled into different packs on every run, and the shine is sent to each pack's exact centre with no limit on how far it can travel — so no pack, no row and no corner of the table is luckier than another. The animation is theatre; the decision was already made fairly.
More wizarding pickers
After something other than a teacher? Try these:
- Not sorted yet? Put on the Hogwarts House Picker.
- After a person rather than a professor: the HP Character Picker.
- Find out which wand chooses you at the HP Wand Picker.
- Need something to cast? Try the HP Spell Picker.
- Want more? Browse all random pickers.