Age, integrity, and the potions textbook

[hekatesheadband]

No: HPFGUIDX 135106

hekatesheadband:
First off, there's the cheating/plaigarism issue. I think there may 
be some cultural issues that are easy to overlook, namely with 
respect to the differences between academic cultures in North 
America and Britain and Ireland. I'm an expatriate Yank (hence my 
perennial idiomatic inconsistency) with a rather bizarre personal 
cultural background, so I'll have to ask everyone to bear with me a 
bit on this one.

Poppy: 
<I'm thinking that Harry, in using Snape's old text, took the 
easy path, and found out too late the consequences of his action. Anyone care to comment, add examples with other characters?>

Julie: 
<I don't know if this has been brought up yet, but there is one factor in Harry's "besting" Hermoine in Potions class that must stick in her craw. Harry is basically cheating. If Harry suddenly developed a real talent for Potions, and was regularly beating Hermoine, I think Hermoine would be a bit jealous but she would certainly acknowledge Harry's abilities and effort (as she does with other things like DADA).>

Jim Ferer: 
<How much cheating is it? Harry's just getting better instruction than
the others with his "enhanced" textbook. He's still doing the work. 
He wouldn't be able to make the potions at all if he had no talent, HBP or not. He did get an "E" on his Potions OWL, after all.>

hekatesheadband:
It's noteworthy that Hermione, conscience and rulebook 
among lions, never presents it in that way, despite her disapproval 
of the book for other reasons. Note also that the students often 
rely heavily on one another's written work, again with no mention of 
cheating or plaigarism. (Then again, I don't know how Binns would 
actually read their work, if he can't hold solid objects...) There 
clearly are standards for academic integrity at Hogwarts - answer 
quills and crib sheets for examinations, for example, are forbidden. 
But when Hermione tells Neville how to make a potion in PoA, Snape 
uses this as grounds to belittle Neville for stupidity and Hermione 
for being an interfering know-it-all. He doesn't punish them for 
cheating. (In Hermione's place, I probably would have just AK'd 
Snape for threatening a poor toad in the first place, but that's for 
another day.) He does call Harry "a liar and a cheat" in HBP, but at 
this point he's thrown so many insults at Harry (sneak, celebrity, 
swollen-headed, nasty little boy, what have you) that none of them 
have much effect - they are fairly generic. And Snape doesn't report 
Harry to McGonagall or Dumbledore for cheating - which, based on 
McGonagall's pre-O.W.L. remarks in OotP, seems to be the usual 
policy for such infractions. 

It's also my impression - and correct me if I'm wrong, as I may well 
be - that definitions of academic cheating are culturally variable, 
and North American ones are considered unususally stringent - to the 
point that it wouldn't even occur to most Europeans to think of 
Harry's behaviour as cheating. (I'm thinking in particular of some 
teachers from both sides of exchanges with France, Australia, 
Britain, Russia, and Latin America. Granted that Latin America is 
not a part of Europe.;) It would be considered cheating if he 
actually wrote a major paper copied directly from the Prince (not 
possible, since there are only notes), if he looked at the book 
during an examination, or, if there are wizarding journals and 
research forums, he presented the Prince's findings as his own 
original work. However, following another person's variant of set 
instructions for an exercise or a practicum would not generally 
qualify.


Jim Ferer: 
<If Snape had been a better man and teacher, all the NEWT students might have had a copy of _Advanced Potions, Second Edition_, by Borage & Snape. If Snape wasn't sharing his tricks of the trade then that doesn't speak well of him as a teacher.>

weildman: 
<I think we have all missed the implications of the HBP's potions book in this discussion... I think the most telling aspect of the HBP potions book is the revelation that it belonged to Snape. This absolutely genius improvement in a 50 year old textbook is allowed to gather dust instead of improving the knowledge of students. I believe Snape failed as a teacher when he failed to use his greater knowledge of the subject to improve the text for the course.  I don't know what his reasons for withholding this knowledge was, but in doing so he failed his students and the wizarding world. The fact that he could
have shared this knowledge and didn't is really telling about his 
character.>

hekatesheadband:
I agree with this wholeheartedly. I'm a denizen of the geeky 
academic world myself, so I just find myself wanting to shout at 
Snape: If you care so much about the "noble art and subtle science 
of potion-brewing," why don't you act to ennoble it further! How can 
someone who claims to care so much about potions make the core of 
his curriculum the following of instructions he knows to be 
inadequate? Granted, he may have wanted students to experiment for 
themselves - but with the way he berates them for failure when they 
do deviate from the book's directions, how can he expect that they 
would ever dare it? There would be no need to spoon-feed it to 
them: the occasional "Arsenius Jigger says to do X, but I find that 
Y can also be useful" or "For homework, think of how you might 
modify these instructions, and explain them." He's never done 
anything like.

As for the chronology issue - I think even JK Rowling, for all her 
difficulties mathematical, could figure out that if the book is too 
old to have belonged to James' classmates, and Snape is the same age 
as James (or would be, if James were alive), the book is too old to 
be Snape's.


Bex:
> The book was originally Eileen Prince's passed on to her son.<

hekatesheadband:
What occurred to me, when I first read HBP, is maybe it's that 
Severus Snape's handwriting is very similar to Eileen Prince's, and 
that at least some of the notes in the book are probably hers. 
(Harry checks "the date," which can't be a pre-printed year of 
issue, because that wouldn't distinguish it from other copies.) In 
fact, one could argue that most of the potions notes are hers, and 
that Snape got his knowledge much the same way as Harry! After all, 
what angered Snape at Harry was specifically the use of a curse, not 
a potion. That's just a wild hypothesis, at least until book 7, but 
it's probably worth a thought. The handwriting is termed "feminine," 
an issue tantalizingly left dangling, and Harry doesn't recognise it 
as Snape's. He's seen Snape's handwriting before, and handwriting 
typically doesn't change much after a person has learned to 
write "fluently."

Anyway, just fodder for thought until book 7 disproves us all. But 
it's plenty of fun 'til then!

-hekatesheadband
(maybe it's the Sorting Hat that's Bono)