Trelawney as a teacher (was: Trelawney isn't a fraud)

[alshainofthenorth]

No: HPFGUIDX 111539

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at q...> 
wrote:
> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Mike" <submarimon15 at y...> 
wrote:
> 
> > Sure, Trelawney's students visit her and I fully believe that 
Parvati 
> > and Lavender would fit into that category. However, she makes the 
> > Neville prediction on the first day of class. This means that 
Neville 
> > has had no reason to visit her previous to this occasion and I 
> > sincerely doubt that Sybill spends her time talking about other 
> > students in the teachers lounge ;)
> > 
> 
> 
> After his first year, Neville is a school  celebrity in his own 
right; he's the dark horse who 
> won the House Cup for Gryffindor. That's the kind of thing that 
gets talked about. 
> Trelawney could have heard gossip about him long before Neville 
showed up for his first 
> lesson. 
> 
> Pippin

...and Alshain adds:
Furthermore, there are such things as self-fulfilling prophecies. 
Tell a shy and clumsy boy (you can tell from his body language and 
general demeanour) that he is going to drop a teacup, and the 
probability that he'll do it increases drastically. A lot of 
vagueness also helps since that allows the victim to interpret the 
predictionfor him/herself -- "the thing you are dreading" could be 
anything from a bad mark on your homework to someone dying. Then add 
a suitable delay, six weeks in this case, and selective bias - 
Lavender had almost forgotten about the prediction and didn't 
remember until she got the letter from home. If she'd been perfectly 
happy all day she wouldn't have thought twice about it. 

A view on Trelawney that I don't think anyone put forward yet (at 
least not in this thread) is that she probably isn't conscious of the 
fact that much of what she's doing is cold reading, clever guesses 
and self-fulfilling prophecies, so I really don't know if 'fraud' is 
the right word since she's acting in good faith. A lot of people 
involved in ESP, communication with spirits etc. really and truly 
believe in what they do. I'm not denying that she has some talent in 
Seeing, but only when her specific, extraordinary predictions begin 
to come true (like the people whose deaths she has predicted, they 
have to be, what, fourteen with Harry?) I'm going to believe that she 
is a True Seer.

Alshain, obviously a skeptic