Broken potionvial and Harry expectations WAS: Re: Bad Writing?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 163338

Magpie wrote:
> Well....as much as I agree that an unfair teacher can have much
farther results than just not liking class, I don't know that we can
really talk about Snape's ruining Harry's career through his
unfairness. It's more like Snape's ruining the career of any student
not getting an O in Potions, because its his higher expectations for
NEWT classes that would have kept Harry out (which seems to be okay by
Dumbledore, just as McGonagall is allowed to only accept E students
and above etc.)
> 
> Since Harry isn't an O student in any other class except DADA that I 
> remember, and has never shown a particular interest or aptitude in
Potions, I can't just assume that with another teacher he'd have
gotten an O on his NEWTS. One might suggest that Binns might have been
more harmful to him by boring him in class--and Trelawney's class
seemed to be worthless too. So while I think it's totally valid to say
that Harry should not have to put up with the stuff he puts up with in
Potions, I don't think I'd blame Harry getting anything less than an O
on Snape given Harry's experience in class. 
> Ironically, as Pippin pointed out, there's a lot of blatant
favoritism going on in Slughorn's class too--even more so, only it
favors Harry.

Carol responds:
Exactly. Harry has seen Snape give the marks that students would
receive on a piece of homework if it were part of the OWL exam, and he
knows how far he needs to go to get an O on that OWL. He knows that
Snape will not be scoring the exams, so he only needs to worry about
the difficulty of the exam, not the fairness of the grading. He knows
that Snape allows only the very best (those who get Os) into his NEWT
Potions classes. And he knows that he needs NEWT Potions to become an
Auror. He's had plenty of fair warning. Only Harry can study what he
needs to know to do well on the OWLs. and only Harry is to blame if he
doesn't get an O in every subject he needs to take the following year.

Of course, JKR also needed Harry to be in NEWT Potions in HBP, so she
would have manipulated the plot in whatever way was required to get
him into that class despite his expectations, even if it meant direct
interference from Dumbledore. But JKR knew that Snape wouldn't be
teaching NEWT Potions the following year. Quite possibly Dumbledore
(and maybe Snape) knew it, too. The time was ripe for Snape to teach
DADA, after all, even before Dumbledore's Horcrux-related injury.

Carol, who thinks that Harry still has a lot to learn from and
relating to Snape and can't wait for that particular aspect of DH