Scary Teachers - Good Teachers (was: Re: Hagrid and Snape...)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 153048

Neri wrote:
<snip>
> Now, had the narrator told us that some of the Ravenclaws have an O
in potions without any foreshadowing it would have been perfectly
consistent, IMO, because Harry didn't have any opportunity to see them
at potions before and wouldn't know about it. But the narrator has
given us plenty of information throughout the series about Draco in
potions and I'm still waiting for a single canon that he has any flare
for the subject. <snip>

Carol:
True, we haven't seen the Ravenclaws or Ernie Macmillan in Potions
class, but Ravenclaws are known for being intelligent, and Ernie is a
hard worker, who was spending a minimum of seven hours a night
studying for his OWLs. It's no surprise that he would receive an OWL
under such conditions. As for Draco and his two fellow Slytherins, we
have first of all the negative evidence that their potions in Snape's
class are never described as falling below Snape's standards. Harry's,
Ron's, Neville's, and Goyle's are often described, but never Draco's,
Theo's, or Blaise's. If their potions had exploded or given off smoke
or a foul smell, the Gryffindors certainly would have noticed, as they
notice Goyle's. 

And here's your single bit of canon that Draco has any flair for the
subject. In the very first Potions class, Snape is "just telling
everyone to look at the perfect way Malfoy had stewed his horned
slugs" when Neville somehow melts Seamus's cauldron (139). So any
favoritism Snape shows to Draco is partly based on, and reinforced by,
Draco's Potions abilities. Snape would not favor a "dunderhead," no
matter whose son he was (he "criticiz[es] almost everyone except
Malfoy," meaning Slytherins as well as Gryffindors. SS Am. ed. 119).

Neri:
> I believe this statement [JKR's uncertainty in an interview wheterh
her forty students are all there is] is canon too. Meta-canon,
actually, but meta-canon is still canon.

Carol:
Maybe. But the evidence in the books is canon-canon, so to speak. It's
there on the page. Ten kids each from Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and
Slytherin per the number of brooms, cauldrons, earmuffs, etc. (Lupin's
DADA class in CoS, which consists only of Gryffindors, also seems to
have only ten students, based on the number of Boggarts described.)
The only unknown is the number of students in Ravenclaw, but the
Sorting Hat talks in OoP about "quartering" the students every year,
and it would be extremely unusual for the intelligent students
(Ravenclaw) to outnumber the ordinary ones (Hufflepuff). "The sorting
Hat" chapter in SS/PS gives us four Ravenclaw names (Terry Boot, Mandy
Brocklehurst, Padma Patil (referred to only by her last name, but we
we know her placement from GoF), and Lisa Turpin, and we later add
Michael Corner and Anthony Goldstein to the list of Ravenclaws in
Harry's year. Although there are gaps in the names called in the
Sorting Hat chapter (for Crabbe and Goyle, for example, are named as
Slytherins but we don't see them sitting under the Hat), the
distribution of the twenty-four students actually named (if I counted
correctly) seems to be roughly equal, and we know that JKR's forty
named students were equally divided, five boys and five girls to each
House. All the available canon evidence (except for the odd and
inconsistent "thirty students" in Umbridge's DADA class in OoP)
indicates that the forty students JKR created for Harry's year are the
only ones who exist.

Neri:
<snip> If JKR wanted to show that Snape's nastiness in class produces
results, doubt she'd have left it up to her readers to calculate the
ratio between 10 NEWT students that are never explicitly said to get
Os and the total number of students in the year that she admits
herself she never consciously thought about. <snip>


Carol:
But there's no need for any such speculation. All we need to do is to
accept Snape's statement that he accepts only O students into NEWT
Potions and accept the fact that the other ten students came prepared
as meaning that they received the O and there's no difficulty. We
don't need to invent imaginary messages that Harry and Ron never
received to account for the presence of ten other students. They're
the ones who benefited from Snape's teaching and/or had an aptitude
for Potions in the first place and received O's (a high "high-pass
rate," certainly, but Snape has stated that he consistently has
exactly that).

As far as the notices that you speculate were sent out to the students
who received E's on their Potions OWLs are concerned, both Harry and
Ron would certainly have received one along with their OWL results
and/or their booklists if such notices existed since Horace Slughorn
is already the Potions master at this point. Neither receives any such
notice, but Dumbledore does tell Harry, who thinks he won't be taking
Potions because he knows he didn't receive an O, not to count his OWLs
before they're delivered (HBP Am. ed. 79), indicating that DD intends
to make sure that Harry gets into Slughorn's class (and perhaps
anticipates that Harry will take Ron along with him). No other student
is under DD's watchful eye and has the benefit of this understandable
and necessary favoritism.

The evidence we have indicates that the students (other than Harry and
Ron) who are in Potions are there because they received an O *and*
because they want to be. Not every student likes Potions (many could
have been turned off to it because Snape taught it or because they
have no aptitude or because it isn't as much fun as "silly wand
waving"), and only two careers that we know of require it at the NEWT
level: Auror and Healer. Students who received an E *may* have
discovered that they could take it on the first day of classes (we
don't know that anyone besides Harry and Ron received this
information) but opted not to do so because they had already made
other plans. The students we see in Slughorn's class, OTOH, must have
planned to take it all along as they have their books, scales, potions
kits, and cauldrons. (Harry threw his cauldron into his trunk with his
other belongings, possibly because he didn't want to leave it at the
Dursleys, but he doesn't have any other Potions equipment with him.)
Only Harry and Ron have to use borrowed books and Slughorn's own
supplies. (I guess Ron brought his cauldron, too, or borrowed one--JKR
evidently doesn't notice such small details.)

Regarding the number of students in the class as compared with those
in other classes, we seem to have ten O students and two E students,
with the rest of the E students not opting to take Potions and perhaps
not even knowing that they have that option. That really is the only
explanation that fits the canon evidence and doesn't require
speculative messages that neither Harry nor Ron received.

Snape's NEWT DADA class, unlike what would have been his NEWT Potions
class, has at your estimate about 25 students(IIRC), about twice as
mnay as Slughorn's Potions class. No credit for this number can be
given to the previous DADA teacher, Dolores Umbridge, and only a
little, perhaps, to Lupin and possibly Crouch!Moody (though I'm not
sure what he did besides cast Unforgiveable Curses on spiders). Most
of the credit goes to Harry, who taught approximately half the class
in the DA. It seems likely that most of these students, like Ron and
Hermione, received E's in DADA. The other students, including Draco
Malfoy and other Slytherins, must have passed the OWL without Harry's
help. Clearly, they didn't receive O's (Harry seems to be the only
student in his year who did so), and they weren't in the DA, so it
seems unlikely that they got E's. How, then, did they get in?

It seems to me that Snape has different expectations for his Potions
students than his DADA students (who have not, in any case, had him as
their DADA teacher). Clearly, he is not taking "only the very best,"
or his NEWT DADA class would consist of Harry. We know that he has
revised his standards to include E students as well as his one O
student. But if everyone in the NEWT DADA class except Harry received
an E, that's an unusually large number of E's, especially since about
half the students, according to Harry, weren't in the DA.

Both the rather large number of students and the presence of students
who were not in the DA can be explained if Snape has lowered his
standards still further to admit anyone who *passed* the DADA OWL
(meaning that they received an O, an E, or an A) into the class. Why
would Snape do that? Simple. He knows that Voldemort is back and that
all of the students, not just "the very best," will need to defend
themselves against the Death Eaters and Dark creatures. (Even Crabbe
and Goyle appear to be taking remedial DADA, ostensibly so that they
can pass the OWL the second time.)

DADA is not Potions, an elite subject that only a few people need, one
for which Snape has the luxury of teaching only the students with an
aptitude for it at the NEWT level. *All* of the students need DADA,
especially now with Voldermort returning, and Snape has to make sure
they all learn what they should have learned from Umbridge, as well as
whatever he can teach them regarding the Unforgiveable Curses, Dark
creatures, along with in-class practice using nonverbal spells. The
class may very well contain 38 out of 40 students (everyone except
Crabbe and Goyle), not because Snape was a bad Potions teacher and
Umbridge (or Harry) was a good DADA teacher, but because Snape is
making sure that every student in the school learns what he or she
needs to learn in the short time available before school is out. And
he surely knows, too, that his own time to teach them is limited
because of the DADA curse.

Carol, who can't imagine Snape making the Gryffindors. Ravenclaws, and
Hufflepuffs learn to cast nonverbal spells if he's ESE!