Snape - Wands - Last Sentence Contest - University

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 18596

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "Amy Z" <aiz24 at h...> wrote:
> I don't I believe for 1/10 of a second that Snape is related to
> Harry. 

How could ANYONE be related to Harry when Dumbledore has stated that 
the Dursleys are the only family he has left?

> Viktor and Fleur don't fit in; both of their wands are shorter than 
> Harry's, though the people are taller.  Lily's is shorter than
> Harry's as well; we have no idea how her height at 11 compared to 
> his.

It makes sense for Viktor and Fleur not to fit in, as their wands are 
not from Ollivander's. Maybe their wands correlate with their height 
compared to the other wands by their wandmakers, or maybe only 
Ollivander uses the correlation with height method. 

>>> Last Sentence Contest: not a quote from Amy <<<

"Hermione looked around at the little crowd of mourners. None of them 
were enjoying the ironically beautiful day, any more than they were 
celebrating having finished school or the final defeat of Voldemort. 
Neither was she, but she felt completely numb rather than teary-eyed. 
She forced herself to look at the coffin and try to understand that, 
even tho' he looked as if he were only sleeping, he was dead forever. 
How could Harry be dead when he looked so much like himself? There 
was the messy black hair, the eyeglasses, the scar..." 

Amy Z wrote:
> IIRC, [JKR} has said both: (snip) --and that there is no 
> wizarding university.

Yesterday (? - anyway, before I took my nap), someone asked how could 
wizards and witches learn advanced skills and do research if there is 
no university. I have thought that there could be research libraries 
and museums that have research labs and that scholars (on staff with 
salary, funded by a research grant from MoM, or independently rich) 
could do their research and publishing there, better than having to 
keep a whole library and lab at home. 

I have thought that people could LEARN to be scholars and researchers 
through an apprenticeship system, based on guilds (collegia) for each 
discipline. Each guild would collect dues from its members and use 
the money for pensions and maintaining a guild hall, containing at 
least a library shared by all the members, and a lecture hall which 
would be used both for public lectures and for oral examinations and 
dissertation defenses.

The future scholar would apprentice himerself to a senior scholar in 
the chosen field. Here are some similarities between the systems:

--Apprenticeship : undergraduate college.  
--Journeyman : B.A.  
--Master (Magister or Magistra) : M.S. or professional degree like M. 
Eng or LL.B.  A Master is allowed to teach apprentices and promote 
them to Journeyman.
--Doctor: Ph.D. A Doctor is allowed to teach Journeymen and Masters. 
I suppose that the Journeyman who wants the rank of Master has to 
pass an oral examination by a committee of Senior Doctors of the 
guild, and that the Master who wants to the rank of Doctor has to do 
research and write it into a dissertation and print several copies of 
the dissertation and make them available for the public to read, and 
then spend 24 straight hours at the lectern answering questions from 
all comers. Some members of the public would come to the oral 
examination and the dissertation defense as a form of entertainment; 
some would prepare the hardest questions they could for the doctoral 
candidate.

The Senior Doctors would listen in shifts. The Senior Doctors decide 
whether the candidate has passed the test for the promotion. If yes, 
the promotion is awarded by the Guild at a formal Guild Dinner. I 
imagine that Guild Dinners are quarterly? The Senior Doctors also 
select which of the Doctors of the Guild are to be surprised with a 
promotion to Senior Doctor.

While many vocational skills could also be taught by apprenticeship, 
there could also be vocational schools. In some cases, it could 
be difficult to distinguish clearly between an apprenticeship and a 
vocational school -- suppose the small-student-population people 
were right and there were 40 graduates a year from Hogwarts. If 20% 
of them went on to medimagical school (a large proportion, I think), 
how would that be different than the medimagical professor(s) having 
8 apprentices?