Why doesn't Snape get DADA? (Was Re: James, a paragon of virtue?)

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 123676


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "northsouth17" 
<northsouth17 at y...> wrote:

>> Nora:
>> Snape is *something* enough that Dumbledore won't let him teach 
>> DADA.  The question is, what how and why?<

> Northsouth:
>
> A really excellent potions master? 
> 
> Perhaps I've never given it quite enough thought, but that's what 
> I've always thought. I've always gotten the impression that Snape 
> is not merely good at Potions, but downright amazing, exceptional, 
> once-in-a-century sort of thing. And if not, and I don't think 
> there's anything in canon to say he's more than "pretty darn good", 
> he seems to like it - His Potions speech in Book 1 remains one of 
> the nicest things he's ever said, IMO.

The canon we have is that he can make the Wolfsbane Potion, which 
Lupin describes as being difficult to make--and that he can't do it, 
so he's grateful that Snape can.  This statement has been subject to 
varied and highly entertaining different readings, by (IIRC) both 
Neri and Pippin, different sides of the Lupin coin. :)

> I've never been able to come up with any reason why Snape would 
> actually *want* the DADA position (A personal, rather thaan 
> dastardly political one, that is). I mean, he really cares about 
> potions! It's not like he took any particular relish in DADA when 
> he did teach it in POA.

Well, I once threw out the idea (mainly for laughs) that Snape's 
Potions speech is the speech of a man who has been forced to settle 
for second best and gradually come to enjoy it, but that it comes out 
of partial resentment as much as anything.  [However, there is pretty 
much no solid canon to suggest either way on what he *really* feels 
about potions.  This is a recurring pattern with the character, you 
will note...]

> Why does Snape want to teach DADA? 
> (I think it's just beacuse what he applied for/assumed he would be 
> teaching way back when he first started, figuring he was just the 
> man, DE experience and all, while Dumbledore figured, for percisely 
> that reason, that messing about with DA all day was not the best 
> thing for him (Not for his students, for him. I think he did awful 
> thigns a a DE that DUmbledore was tryign to distance him from.)And 
> he's just been stubbornly reapling for the position ever since)   

If you take the interview answer as telling you something (hush over 
there, Betsy), it *does* state that Snape came to Dumbledore and 
said "I'd like to teach DADA"...it's a point of contention whether he 
really means it when he keeps on applying for it or whether it's 
something of a personal joke.  I have to say that when Dumbledore was 
willing to hire an obvious fraud over Snape, that's, ummm, telling.

We have zippo canon on whether Potions expertise is the rare and 
prized thing that fanfic authors tend to make it out to be.  None.  
While we do know that DADA has had trouble getting a teacher.

Indeed, 'Potions Master' itself is probably more likely referring to 
the institutional position than to any outside certification or 
especial skills.  I myself doubt that it is Snape's special 
irreplacable Potions skills that keep Dumbledore from letting him 
have DADA.  He's not exactly a model pedagogue, although we have 
hints that he gets results.  [High standards are not a de facto 
confirmation that he gets said results, after all.]

I tend to agree with your idea that Dumbledore thinks, for whatever 
reason, that it's not the best thing for Snape to be doing (and 
that's what the interview states in the broadest general terms).  We 
just don't quite know exactly *why* at present.

-Nora notes that she will be genially smug iff'n the most obvious 
readings of the interviews comes out to be the right one, of course