From: bdesham@gmail.com   
      
   > Here in Minnesota wrote,   
   >   
   > > I'm re-reading the half blood prince.   
   > >   
   > > There's the old is Snape evil debate... bully to the kids, etc.   
   > >   
   > > I think his worst crime was in his teaching. I always thought he was a   
   > > poor teacher, but he wrote all the notes in Harry's copy of the textbook   
   > > and never bothered to share this knowledge with his students. And this   
   > > was stuff he learned when he was on a teenager; I assume he knew more   
   > > later.   
      
   I don't know. I think this depends on how resilient you think the students   
   are to the kind of emotional abuse that Snape doles out. For most of them,   
   especially the younger ones, I think it would be preferable to have a kind   
   teacher teaching unnecessarily-difficult material than to have easier   
   material taught by a sociopath. In this sense, Snape's horrible attitude   
   toward his students is more offensive than the fact that he isn't sharing   
   his own discoveries with them, because having an evil teacher is worse than   
   having hard material.   
      
   David Harmon wrote:   
      
   > For years he has been teaching students potions from textbooks that he   
   > knew to be wrong or inferior.  And then blaming them when the results   
   > turned out flawed.   
      
   It's just another manifestation of his bullying personality. By not sharing   
   his newer, better recipes, he gets to watch his students try (and usually   
   fail) to master a complex technique, providing a reason--well, excuse--for   
   him to insult them. Not only that, but he knows that *he* has a better way   
   to do it, allowing his self-aggrandizing side to become even more inflated   
   and arrogant. It's a slick, self-reinforcing system he's got going here...   
   if an abusive and evil one ;-)   
      
   --   
   Benjamin D. Esham  |  bdesham@gmail.com  |  www.bdesham.info   
   “White shores and beyond. A far green country, under a swift sunrise.”   
   “Well...  That isn’t so bad.”   
   “No...  No it isn’t.”               — Gandalf and Pippin in RotK   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)