What can Harry teach Hermione in DA ?

[iris_ft]

No: HPFGUIDX 73956

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Doriane" <delwynmarch at y...> 
wrote:
> 

> 
> Which bring another question I have. When Harry receives the DADA 
> books for Christmas, he's excited by all the new stuff he'll be 
able 
> to teach the DA. But how can he teach them if he doesn't know them 
> first ? I'm not saying he can't learn them first on his own, but 
that 
> would be terribly out of character.

I will start this post by quoting Hermione, in book 1:
"Harry, you are a great wizard, you know."
To which Harry replies:
"I'm not as good as you."
And then Hermione says:
"Me! Books! And cleverness!"
(HP/ PS, chapt. 16, p 208)
In those lines, Hermione recognizes that all her intellectual 
knowledge is not enough, and that Harry has something more, 
something she doesn't master herself.
It's the old debate "theoretical knowledge /vs/ practical knowledge".
Okay, you can tell me that when he goes through the trapdoor in book 
1, Harry doesn't know much about practice. That's right. He learns 
as the ordeals follow one another. It's on-the-job learning. And 
that's mainly how Harry uses to learn: when he needs to.
He didn't learn how to conjure a Patronus. He didn't do it because 
he wanted to know how it worked. He did it because he needed a 
Patronus in order to keep playing Quidditch. It was a necessity, an 
emergency. It was a pragmatic process.
On the contrary, Hermione learns because she enjoys learning. It's a 
purely intellectual process.
The problem is that intellectual knowledge has its own limits. Let's 
take a few examples:
knowing theoretically  how to drive a car, how to realise a recipe, 
how to paint with water colour, how to use a foreign language 
grammar (private joke) won't help you to drive a car, to cook, to 
paint or to communicate if you don't practise in order to master 
your knowledge.
Hermione probably knows a lot about DADA, but her knowledge is only 
theoretical. As she didn't practise, it's quite useless.
It's useless even in Harry's case: when he tries to Cruciate 
Bellatrix Lestrange, he doesn't manage, because though he knows the 
curse, he never practised it.
Pragmatic  learning is different, but apparently, in DADA, it's the 
best. 
Now that Voldemort is back, there's no time for theory any more. 
There's only an emergency: saving one's or the friend's life. OWLs 
getting closer are another one, but it's not the more important.
Hermione perfectly knows that Harry is brilliant when he learns on-
the-job. That's why she asks him to teach DADA. And she probably 
knows too that he has powers she will never have, although she's 
very clever and very cultured. 
Concerning Harry teaching thanks to the books he was given, I would 
say that a learning person can be a wonderful teacher at the same 
time. There's a big difference between teaching something you master 
for a long time and teaching something you are still learning. Is 
the first case, though you master the subject perfectly well, you 
take a risk: the risk of forgetting how it is hard to learn. In the 
second case, though you are still clumsy, though you don't know 
perfectly how to do, you can better tell the others how to do, 
because your own difficulties, the way you did to overpass them, are 
still in your mind.
I know that it is a paradox, but it's like that. And that's also 
Harry's paradox as a Hogwarts student: he knows definitely more than 
some of his teachers, probably because, before meeting them, he met 
a master: Voldemort.

Hope I wasn't too long, nor confused,

Amicalement,

Iris