What can Harry teach Hermione in DA ?

[Doriane]

No: HPFGUIDX 74095

"iris_ft" wrote:
 
> 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.

You're not going to convince me with that :-) because I've never seen 
what makes Harry so different. If I had to say what I admire in him, 
I'd say his resourcefulness, his ability to keep a cold head in the 
heat of things. But does that make him a great wizard ? For that 
matter, what exactly IS a great wizard ? If it is a particularly 
magically talented person, I don't see that Harry is such a great 
wizard. He's good, but nothing exceptional (except at Quidditch). So ?

> It's the old debate "theoretical knowledge /vs/ practical 
> knowledge".

Nope. Doesn't work. Hermione is terribly good both in theory AND in 
practice. She knows the spells and she makes them work. Can you give 
me a spell she studied and didn't manage to master ? The only spell I 
can remember her failing is the Patronus Charm when they were 
attacked by a hundred Dementors. Hardly meaningful.

> 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.

Again, I must contradict you. Hermione keeps putting the spells she 
learns into practice. Whether small ones (Reparo) or big ones (the 
Polyjuice Potion, even though it's not strictly speaking a spell), 
she learns them and uses them. I'm sure if she were given a chance to 
learn them pragmatically the way Harry does, she would do very well 
too.

> 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)

Lol ! *wink* *wink*

> 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.

But again I say : she didn't practice only because she never had a 
chance to. She was never given an opportunity to do so.

> 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.

My point, precisely.

> 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. 

Like WHAT ? We all keep talking about Harry's special powers, but I 
can't see what they are.

> 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 agree with you completely, but that doesn't explain what Harry has 
to teach to Hermione. In fact, she'd probably do a better job, since 
she can learn a spell much faster than he does, as we keep seeing in 
the classes.

> 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.

A master which gave him everything that's special about him : 
Parseltongue, special connections to LV, etc... Other than that, 
Harry doesn't know anything more than his teachers.

Del