Snape the teacher

[houyhnhnm102]

No: HPFGUIDX 152375

Shaun Hately

> > The point is though - that gender may make a 
> > difference here to the way some of us are seeing 
> > Snape's teaching style. 

Tonks:
> Thank you Shaun for that very insightful and informative 
> post. I think you have hit the nail on the head here. 
> I am female and defend Snape, but that is because I am 
> putting myself in his place. If he were my teacher when 
> I was a child, I would have been Neville. As I  child I 
> needed a warm, loving nurturing teacher.

houyhnhnm:

I think class expectations and age both play a part, too.  I went to 
working class elementary schools, then I was in the honors program in 
high school with a lot of kids from the other side of the tracks.  
The teachers I had for honors classes were all very confrontational 
and demanding.  They were all either Snapes or McGonagalls. You could 
be ripped apart in front the whole class for turning in mediocre 
work. The conclusion from my own experience is that "socialization" 
(=compliance) is the expectation for working class and low income 
kids (and for females!)  Academic excellence is only expected from 
rich kids (because they have to get into good universities).  And too 
often, in math and science, only from males.  Academic excellence 
requires tough, demanding teachers.

So here's where I tie it to canon.  Snape, obviously, expects the 
highest level of excellence from all his students and his teaching 
style is appropriate to his expectations.  Umbridge wants to produce 
compliant citizens for a bureaucracy and her methods are those of 
brute force discipline to "break" students and boring seatwork to 
reduce eveyone to the lowest common intellectual denominator.  
Perhaps there are Hogwarts teachers whose aim is only to produce 
happy well-adjusted WW citizens who are "nice" and therefore 
reward "nice" behavior while discouraging academic ambition.

I would also like to point out that none of the students at Hogwarts 
are "children" in terms of their stage of intellectual development.  
Even the first years, at 11 years of age, are already in early 
adolescence and, therefore, transitional between concrete and formal 
thinking (assuming they are like Muggles in their intellectual 
development which I think is a reasonable assumption.  If anything I 
would expect Wizard children to be a little on the precocious side).