Teaching Styles

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 147780

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Bruce Alan Wilson" 
<bawilson at ...> wrote:

<snip>

> Anyone here studied the Martial Arts?  Were your instructors 
> cuddly? 

Very, actually. :)
 
> Snape is a lot harsher than other teachers because he feels he has to 
> be.  Perhaps he knows of someone whose Potions or DADA teacher WASN'T 
> that harsh and who got himself or someone else killed or injured 
> thereby?  Perhaps Snape himself got someone hurt or killed because of 
> some error or omission that he (thinks) he would not have made if his 
> teacher hadn't been a little tougher on him.

Perhaps.  But I think there's an excluded middle and a train of logic 
that thinks it has necessity on its side but doesn't, in here.

There's no immediate correlation between the type of harshness which 
Snape shows in class and intellectual rigor--toughness, we might call 
it.  One can be tough and demand that from one's students without being 
personal about it or pulling one's own issues into the class, for one 
thing.  And I'll state upfront that to my best reading of the books, 
and this hasn't been contradicted plain-out yet, Snape makes things 
personal.

I have studied a martial art, albeit one often considered 'fuzzy' by 
some people.  My instructors have all been very warm, gentle, and 
caring people, because students learn better (and much more quickly, 
too) when they're not scared and have confidence in their actions.  
YMMV, but that's my own personal experience in the martial arts.

And my own experience in academia is that anyone who has a major hang-
up over titles and always being shown the level of formality which he 
thinks he deserves, those people almost always have Serious Issues.  
Since we're playing personal analogies today, fair game, I think.

-Nora gets ready to go off to her tough yet friendly, personable, and 
caring professor for morning class