The final sessions of the Defense Association ran through the first three weeks of April.
Not the inner group — those continued, would continue through May, the specific work of people who had been building something together and were not done building. But the wider group, the one that had grown from the first cautious meeting in October to the forty-three students who were now coming regularly: those sessions were entering their final phase, and the final phase required a different kind of work.
He had been thinking about the apparition teaching since February, when it had become clear that the wider group had reached the level where the question was no longer whether but when. He had gone to Dumbledore first, in a Tuesday session, and laid out the argument with the specific precision of someone who had been preparing it: the students who had reached sufficient skill level, the practical value in the current context, the case for Madam Pomfrey's involvement as a safety condition. Dumbledore had listened and had looked at him with the expression he had for things that were both entirely reasonable and somewhat extraordinary and had said: 'I will speak with Amelia.'
Amelia Bones had come to Hogwarts on the fifteenth of April.
She sat in Dumbledore's office with Ron and McGonagall and Madam Pomfrey and went through the list — the specific students, the skill assessments Ron had been building since January, the methodology he proposed for the teaching. She read each page with the flat full attention she gave everything, and when she finished she looked up and said: 'Seventeen students.'
'Seventeen who are ready,' Ron said. 'There are another eleven who are close. I'd hold those for after OWLs.'
'The teaching,' she said. 'You're confident in it.'
'I've been teaching them combat magic for seven months,' he said. 'The apparition work is less difficult than what they've been doing.'
She looked at him for a moment with the specific quality she had developed across the year for interactions with him — the quality of someone who had revised an expectation significantly upward and had arrived, by now, at the position of simply taking the revised expectation as given. 'Approved,' she said. 'With Madam Pomfrey present for the first three sessions.'
Madam Pomfrey, who had been present for all the ward theory discussions and several of the training sessions and had developed, across the year, the specific expression of someone who had stopped being surprised and had arrived at a kind of watchful pride, said: 'I'll be there.'
He taught apparition over four sessions in the last two weeks of April. The seventeen students who were ready had the quality that months of training produced: they followed instruction without needing the instruction justified, they attempted things carefully rather than recklessly, and when something went wrong — the partial splinching of a Ravenclaw sixth-year on the second session, minor, a finger, handled immediately — they processed it with the specific composure of people who had been taught to process things under pressure and had practiced it.
By the end of the fourth session, fourteen of the seventeen could apparate reliably within the designated space. The remaining three were close. He wrote detailed notes for each of them and left them with the specific confidence of someone who would get there before the summer.