Sadism or not ? McGonagall and her punishments

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 186676


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> a_svirn:
> And Gryffindor colours are red and gold.  I can totally see Parvati wearing an ornamental butterfly in her House colours, which would be considered too gaudy by St. Hilda's standards. Not that we have any reason to believe that Hogwats regulations are anywhere near as strict as St: Hilda's: otherwise Luna would have spent her entire time in Hogwarts in detention. McGonagall in this scene reprimands Parvati for her taste, which is a personal attack and therefore inappropriate. 

Pippin:
Luna is a Ravenclaw and her appearance is therefore Flitwick's responsibility. If he chooses to be lax that does not mean that McGonagall has to be lax also. I agree that McGonagall's irritation shows she is tense about the situation, and she may normally be inclined to let minor lapses pass. But she is acting 'in loco parentis' and you'd better believe that parents have the right to educate  their childrens' taste and to demand a certain standard of appearance on formal occasions. 

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> a_svirn:
> Yes, that would be bad form indeed. But we don't know if Neville noticed that his list had gone missing, and McGonagall did not bother to find out.

Pippin:
We don't know whether Neville made the list  so he could study it and impress the password on his memory before leaving the tower, or so that he wouldn't have to memorize the passwords at all. In either case he was responsible for knowing where it was at all times and for reporting the fact if it went missing. 

Obviously Neville didn't notice when he'd lost track of the list, or he would have known that it was stolen from his bedside table. That would have shown that Sirius had an accomplice inside the tower, since Sirius himself couldn't use the list to break into the tower until he had obtained it. If Neville had reported it,   it would have alerted the staff to be prepared -- at the very least the passwords would have been changed. 

I don't understand the insistence that Neville had no other means of coping with the situation. If it was too embarrassing to ask for help outright, he could have traded for it. Surely somebody in Gryffindor Tower must struggle with herbology? 

Anyway, why so insistent that McGonagall should have recognized and known how to compensate for Neville's learning disabilities? The whole concept was unknown in the real world until relatively recently, and the wizards seem to be as far behind us in their theories of mental function as they are ahead of us in their ability to manipulate it.

*We* may know that stress makes memory problems worse, and therefore being aggressive with Neville is exactly the wrong thing to do. But there's no canon that anyone in the wizarding world knows that.  In the WW, the only known way to compensate for a learning problem is to try harder, and that's what Snape and McGonagall are trying to make Neville do. 

McGonagall may be doing it because she cares about her students, and Snape may be doing it because he cares about his exceptionally high pass rate, but in neither case, IMO, are they trying to make things worse, although unfortunately that's the result. 

Of course they'd be better teachers if they realized their method wasn't working for Neville and changed it, but Rowling couldn't resist making the professors a sort of rogue's gallery of teaching styles,  so none of them is as flexible as a good teacher should be. 

Pippin