Snape’s Questionable Teaching Skills
Oct. 2nd, 2016 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strix_albavia http://ift.tt/2dzchGS:
mollyscribbles:
corseque:
laureljupiter:
owlpostagain:
Say what you want about Snape as a person, but it’s incredibly difficult to argue that Snape was a good teacher.
Harry learned better from a book annotated by Snape than he did from Snape himself. If your job can be done better by a textbook (even if it’s one you modified), then you’re not a good teacher.
Snape makes his students nervous, negatively affecting their performance. In 1st year, Snape is specifically said to make the students nervous during their final exam: “Snape made them all nervous, breathing down their necks while they tried to remember how to make a Forgetfulness potion.”
Snape plays favorites. Obviously he hates Harry and will vanish Harry’s potion to ensure he gets a zero. But even if we put Harry aside, he’s pretty blatant about it.
Snape relentlessly bullies the worst student in his class. Harry asserts that Snape’s bullying has a negative impact on Neville’s work: “Neville regularly went to pieces in Potions lessons; it was his worst subject, and his great fear of Professor Snape made things ten times worse.” He bullies Neville in front of his peers and even other teachers. He tells Lupin that Neville is useless without Hermione to help him, and tells the entire dueling club that Neville “causes devastation with the simplest of spells.”
Snape is also cruel to one of the top students in the class. In addition to bullying Neville, Snape humiliates Hermione on multiple occasions. He insults her appearance, calls her an insufferable know-it-all, tells her to stop showing off, shouts at her for helping Neville, etc. And this is all despite the fact that she’s likely one of his top students. At one point, he stops mid-lesson to read Rita’s Skeeter’s Witch Weekly article about Harry/Hermione out loud, in its entirety. He even throws in a few of his own comments and pauses to allow for laughter at the end of sentences. And remember, this is a 14-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl who have the misfortune to have their “relationship” speculated about in a tabloid.
Snape’s retention rate is not particularly high. Out of Harry/Ron’s entire year, 12 students achieve E/Os and continue the subject. We know that aspiring Aurors are required to take Potions, as are Healers. You would think that Potions would be quite relevant for a student in anything vaguely science/medicine-related. It’s a fairly important part of magical life with a very practical application. And yet only 12 students chose to continue, with a disproportionate number coming from in Snape’s own house.
I feel like it’s kind of worth pointing out that this incredibly dysfunctional, toxic situation is the result of an employer using political, carceral, and emotional blackmail to force someone to take and keep a job they don’t want and aren’t capable of performing to standard? And then refusing to take any kind of disciplinary or corrective methods when that employee behaves destructively in all the ways this post describes, because their unhappiness/karmic punishment is a bigger priority than the damage they cause.
Like, seriously, everything up there is true, but Snape wasn’t doing this while squatting in a tenured track or abusing teacher’s union rights or refusing to leave his position. I don’t think there was any reason he had to keep that teaching job other than Dumbledore thinking it was both useful and amusing to keep him close, in a job he hated. If you want to get more into the psychological manipulation involved, trapping someone in a job where they’re isolated from adult society and constantly fucking things up is a fantastic way to keep them emotionally dependent on you. You keep them in a constant state of that transgression/punishment cycle because they’ll be even *more* dependent if they think they deserve it.
On a practical, workplace politics level though, Snape couldn’t hack it at being a teacher, started lashing out abusively, and never stopped, and was never made or allowed to stop. Dumbledore was more invested in keeping Snape in a constant state of subservience and petty misery than he was in the academic and emotional welfare of 17 years of students. When you have someone in your employee base who is routinely incompetent and destructive, you fire or move that person, unless you on some level enjoy the chaos and misery they’re constantly creating around them, which all those descriptions of Dumbledore’s twinkling eyes seemed to be flagging that he very much did.
One of my favorite fanfics once pointed out that Snape became a teacher only a couple years after he graduated, and that he must have had to teach the same students that watched him be bullied. Like, the 5-7th years, the year he started teaching, knew him as “Snivellus.”
So it’s interesting to think that he must subconsciously, or even consciously, see all students, no matter their actual age difference, as his peers/rivals. That these kids are threatening and awful. In those first few years, it was probably not far from the truth.
And since the kids never age, but he’s stuck in a horrifying limbo, he hasn’t departed at all from fighting other students like they’re his age and all his enemies. He doesn’t mature or develop at all. He bullies them first, and revels cruelly in any scrap of superiority. he’s verbally abusive. He sees children as his rivals.
Just all-over, overwhelmingly, a bad idea to have him teach. Imagine having to go right back to your high school to teach the same students who saw you be bullied. Not for a million dollars.
But, you know, Dumbledore apparently thought “it was a valuable life lesson to have the students have to learn to deal with bad teachers” in his school, or however JK explained his reasoning (someone asked her once why the hell Gilderoy was ever a teacher).
so ok, everybody gets to suffer.
an idea occurred to me a while back – the only reason Snape wanted the DADA job was that the curse on the position meant he had a decent shot at never having to teach again. We don’t see him do anything remarkable when he has the position, he doesn’t seem to enjoy teaching any more than usual, but it’s ultimately an escape route.
I very much appreciate that the replies in this post (the version I’m reblogging anyway; haven’t looked elsewhere) are fairly even-handed wrt Snape. It offers an explanation for part of why his shitty behavior is the way it is, and why it’s allowed to continue unchecked, without excusing him from blame. He’s a petty, vindictive person who made some phenomenally bad choices; and someone in a position of power over him ensured that he was trapped him in the same psychological cycle that contributed to him being a petty, vindictive, miserable human being. I haven’t thought about him from this angle, which made it interesting to read.
mollyscribbles:
corseque:
laureljupiter:
owlpostagain:
Say what you want about Snape as a person, but it’s incredibly difficult to argue that Snape was a good teacher.
Harry learned better from a book annotated by Snape than he did from Snape himself. If your job can be done better by a textbook (even if it’s one you modified), then you’re not a good teacher.
Snape makes his students nervous, negatively affecting their performance. In 1st year, Snape is specifically said to make the students nervous during their final exam: “Snape made them all nervous, breathing down their necks while they tried to remember how to make a Forgetfulness potion.”
Snape plays favorites. Obviously he hates Harry and will vanish Harry’s potion to ensure he gets a zero. But even if we put Harry aside, he’s pretty blatant about it.
Snape relentlessly bullies the worst student in his class. Harry asserts that Snape’s bullying has a negative impact on Neville’s work: “Neville regularly went to pieces in Potions lessons; it was his worst subject, and his great fear of Professor Snape made things ten times worse.” He bullies Neville in front of his peers and even other teachers. He tells Lupin that Neville is useless without Hermione to help him, and tells the entire dueling club that Neville “causes devastation with the simplest of spells.”
Snape is also cruel to one of the top students in the class. In addition to bullying Neville, Snape humiliates Hermione on multiple occasions. He insults her appearance, calls her an insufferable know-it-all, tells her to stop showing off, shouts at her for helping Neville, etc. And this is all despite the fact that she’s likely one of his top students. At one point, he stops mid-lesson to read Rita’s Skeeter’s Witch Weekly article about Harry/Hermione out loud, in its entirety. He even throws in a few of his own comments and pauses to allow for laughter at the end of sentences. And remember, this is a 14-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl who have the misfortune to have their “relationship” speculated about in a tabloid.
Snape’s retention rate is not particularly high. Out of Harry/Ron’s entire year, 12 students achieve E/Os and continue the subject. We know that aspiring Aurors are required to take Potions, as are Healers. You would think that Potions would be quite relevant for a student in anything vaguely science/medicine-related. It’s a fairly important part of magical life with a very practical application. And yet only 12 students chose to continue, with a disproportionate number coming from in Snape’s own house.
I feel like it’s kind of worth pointing out that this incredibly dysfunctional, toxic situation is the result of an employer using political, carceral, and emotional blackmail to force someone to take and keep a job they don’t want and aren’t capable of performing to standard? And then refusing to take any kind of disciplinary or corrective methods when that employee behaves destructively in all the ways this post describes, because their unhappiness/karmic punishment is a bigger priority than the damage they cause.
Like, seriously, everything up there is true, but Snape wasn’t doing this while squatting in a tenured track or abusing teacher’s union rights or refusing to leave his position. I don’t think there was any reason he had to keep that teaching job other than Dumbledore thinking it was both useful and amusing to keep him close, in a job he hated. If you want to get more into the psychological manipulation involved, trapping someone in a job where they’re isolated from adult society and constantly fucking things up is a fantastic way to keep them emotionally dependent on you. You keep them in a constant state of that transgression/punishment cycle because they’ll be even *more* dependent if they think they deserve it.
On a practical, workplace politics level though, Snape couldn’t hack it at being a teacher, started lashing out abusively, and never stopped, and was never made or allowed to stop. Dumbledore was more invested in keeping Snape in a constant state of subservience and petty misery than he was in the academic and emotional welfare of 17 years of students. When you have someone in your employee base who is routinely incompetent and destructive, you fire or move that person, unless you on some level enjoy the chaos and misery they’re constantly creating around them, which all those descriptions of Dumbledore’s twinkling eyes seemed to be flagging that he very much did.
One of my favorite fanfics once pointed out that Snape became a teacher only a couple years after he graduated, and that he must have had to teach the same students that watched him be bullied. Like, the 5-7th years, the year he started teaching, knew him as “Snivellus.”
So it’s interesting to think that he must subconsciously, or even consciously, see all students, no matter their actual age difference, as his peers/rivals. That these kids are threatening and awful. In those first few years, it was probably not far from the truth.
And since the kids never age, but he’s stuck in a horrifying limbo, he hasn’t departed at all from fighting other students like they’re his age and all his enemies. He doesn’t mature or develop at all. He bullies them first, and revels cruelly in any scrap of superiority. he’s verbally abusive. He sees children as his rivals.
Just all-over, overwhelmingly, a bad idea to have him teach. Imagine having to go right back to your high school to teach the same students who saw you be bullied. Not for a million dollars.
But, you know, Dumbledore apparently thought “it was a valuable life lesson to have the students have to learn to deal with bad teachers” in his school, or however JK explained his reasoning (someone asked her once why the hell Gilderoy was ever a teacher).
so ok, everybody gets to suffer.
an idea occurred to me a while back – the only reason Snape wanted the DADA job was that the curse on the position meant he had a decent shot at never having to teach again. We don’t see him do anything remarkable when he has the position, he doesn’t seem to enjoy teaching any more than usual, but it’s ultimately an escape route.
I very much appreciate that the replies in this post (the version I’m reblogging anyway; haven’t looked elsewhere) are fairly even-handed wrt Snape. It offers an explanation for part of why his shitty behavior is the way it is, and why it’s allowed to continue unchecked, without excusing him from blame. He’s a petty, vindictive person who made some phenomenally bad choices; and someone in a position of power over him ensured that he was trapped him in the same psychological cycle that contributed to him being a petty, vindictive, miserable human being. I haven’t thought about him from this angle, which made it interesting to read.
