CHAPTER DISCUSSION: Chamber of Secrets Chapter 18: Dobby's reward

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 189330


> Joey:
> 
> True and that is why I think he could do great in research. Do you think a person who *genuinely* wants to teach will be that horrible with students like Neville and Hermione? I'd think they would rather offer help to students like Neville or at least refrain from being that nasty. 

Pippin:
Snape was Head of Slytherin. I think that indicates a degree of approval for the way he does his job and a certain ambition to be recognized for doing it. He didn't need to be a Head of House to protect Harry.

 I think "teaching" has to be broken into its constituent bits before we consider whether Snape liked doing it. Clearly he enjoyed lecturing, he liked being considered an authority, and he was proud of that high pass rate. He thought it important to organize the material and present it to the class in a logical way -- as we can tell from his complaint about Lupin's lack of organization and  Hermione's protest when he takes up the topic of werewolves out of order. He liked to see people appreciate the beauty and power of potions, and he wanted them to be able to protect themselves from those who used the Dark Arts.  

What he didn't like was coaxing better performance out of the inept or the uninterested. Nowadays  that's  an important part of what a teacher, especially a teacher of children, is supposed to do and Snape was obviously lacking. However, there is the alternate and older philosophy that treated children as miniature adults, according to which  the incompetent and the uninterested deserved to fail. I think that is the tradition that Snape was brought up in -- it is certainly  one which accords with the general elitism of Slytherin House. 

The interesting thing is that Snape was conflicted about it -- he liked that high pass rate. So he didn't ignore the students who did poorly (though they, like Harry, wished he would). He bullied them, which is, as Shaun liked to point out,  effective with some students, the ones whose problems are arrogance and boredom rather than lack of confidence. Snape and McGonagall don't seem to know how to deal with lack of confidence, probably because the classroom is the one place where they never doubted their abilities. 

In regard to the discussion about Snape's grading, we do have some information that he was capable of grading fairly. We're told that Hermione beat Draco in every class. I think it would be impossible to say what grade Harry should have gotten on his dementor essay. After all, an essay isn't judged only on the truth of its argument but on how well that argument is presented. If Harry just baldly asserted that the patronus spell is better because it worked better for him, I'd give him a low grade myself. And I doubt that Harry ever considered there might be situations in which a wizard who could produce a patronus might not want to do so -- for example, if he was in disguise. 

It's not necessarily true that Harry would have remarked on it if he'd done better than expected. He was certain that Snape was going to poison one of the students in order to demonstrate antidotes when he escaped that class in GoF to get his wand weighed, but he never even tries to find out if that happened. You'd think he'd want to know if one of his friends had been poisoned, but no. 

It just shows that Harry wasn't nearly as Snape-obsessed as we are. He didn't think about Snape unless he had to. In fact I think he named his son after Snape partly in recognition that if he had really thought about Snape, he'd have known the truth. Snape, one way or another, came to Harry's rescue every single year. 

In fact I think that is the most important thing he taught Harry: that a brave person who hates you can still be a valuable ally, in fact more trustworthy than a friend who is a coward.

Pippin