Regarding Trelawney

[jodel at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 57062

The badness of Trelawny's teaching style has been much discussed lately. But 
this isn't about that.

So far as teaching is concerned, she's probably about the best that they 
could get. A True Seer would probably have better things to do. She is 
conversant with a wide ranger of Divination methods and can teach the 
mechanics of all of them. She also has at least a weak gift (hence the 
ridiculaous lengths to which she goes in order to try to maximise it) and may 
be able to recognize which of the students in her classes may also have the 
real gift of sight and bew able to at least get them started. 

She probably has a very dull life and her thirst for excitement misleads her 
into predicting grand sweeping events which never actually happen. She is 
perfectly capable of foreseeing little nothing events like Neville breaking 
his teacup or Lavander getting bad news from home on a specific day. But her 
interpretations blow them so far out of porportion to the point that level 
heads like Hermione's discount the whole of them because the prediction as 
stated does not match the event as seen. If Trelawny had any sort of sense of 
porportion she would have said that Lavendar would get bad news on 
such-and-such a date (which she did) instead of dressing it up about "the 
thing you most fear" which confuses the fact of recieving bad news with the 
event that the news reported -- which took place on some other date 
altogether. True she is going way overboard in encouraging the students to 
predict tragedies, and she is a poor interpreter of the influences at work in 
her craft. But she is not a *complete* waste of space.

I also think that she has been at Hogwarts for a long time. 

A very long time.

Like, 50-60 years at least.

In fact, I think that that "first" prediction of hers took place in a very 
similar circumstance as her second. She poped out with it in front of 
students (Tom Riddle among them) and had no awareness of what she had said 
afterwards. Since I doubt that Riddle would have said anything that concerned 
himself to anyone in charge, I suspect that there was at least one other 
witness who told someone on staff, probably Dumbledore, possibly Dippet. 

We can only hope that Dumbledore will come clean with it before hemakes his 
exit (temporary or otherwise).

-JOdel


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