Another sign of Hagrid's improvement as a teacher

[darrin_burnett]

No: HPFGUIDX 41279

I can't believe I didn't think of this before when I was defending 
Hagrid's teaching, but working my way through the UK editions has 
helped.

When Hagrid takes a day off in GoF after being outed as a half-giant, 
Grubby-Plank substitutes and teaches young unicorns, to the delight 
of the girls in class.

Hagrid comes back and, though it goes against his nature, teaches 
baby unicorns, impressing even that Slytherin chick, Pansy Parkinson.

What happened here? It looks to me like Hagrid realized what the 
students were interested in and kept going in that direction. He 
actually improved Grubby-Plank's lesson by using baby unicorns, which 
opened up the class to the boys. Grubby-Plank's lessons left the boys 
out. Hagrid, more skilled at magical creatures, was able to capture 
the more difficult to find babies.

As an aside, this is interesting because of the recent sexism debate. 
One of the relatively new schools of thought in U.S. education is 
that the system is now actually detrimental to young boys, who are 
constantly being left behind by their female classmates. Grubby-Plank 
didn't seem to care if the boys learned, did she?

The text insinuates, from Harry's PoV, that Hagrid also chose this 
lesson because the skrewts kept killing each other and of course we 
later find that he needed at least one for the Maze.

But, it seems like we're seeing improvement and a willingness to 
change, something that should be expected from a new teacher.

In the U.S. education system, teachers are usually on some kind of 
probation period -- in my state of Illinois, it's four years -- 
before being granted tenure. Tenure makes the person more difficult 
to fire.

It seems like Hagrid is doing his best to improve, which is more 
than "tenured" teachers like Trelawney and Snape have been doing. 

Darrin
-- Hi, Jenny from Ravenclaw! Anxiously waiting your response ;)