I wonder how honest JKR is with her anti-Snape and anti-Draco comments. I mean, maybe she is honest in that she feels the question being asked is, "Are they good people?", to which her answer is, "No. Don't they seem awful to you?" But she could easily have made them unequivocably awful - Sauron, say, is pretty unredeemable in the LotR (let us ignore the Silmarillion) - but she didn't. Draco garners sympathy because we see the conditioning he's been subjected to - his father on his case because he was beat in the school exams by a Mudblood - and we see, from the very beginning, depth to Snape that we see in almost no other character: he hates Harry, but he saves him; Dumbledore trusts him absolutely. This is even before Book 5 and the Pensieve. If she sees him as simply bad, why all this addition? If not on an analytical level then at least on an intuitional one she must see that this makes him more "realistic".
He might be an effective teacher in post-graduate studies No, I've had this teacher in post-graduate studies and he's pretty hopeless there, too. Give him a lab and just enough funding and don't let him partake in the learning process: he won't do it any good. But as you say, There's more to life than nice. The awful teacher was still a decent scientist - just an awful teacher, and not very nice overall. It doesn't prevent one from being able to integrate complicated functions, apparently.
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Date: 2003-08-25 04:40 am (UTC)He might be an effective teacher in post-graduate studies
No, I've had this teacher in post-graduate studies and he's pretty hopeless there, too. Give him a lab and just enough funding and don't let him partake in the learning process: he won't do it any good. But as you say,
There's more to life than nice. The awful teacher was still a decent scientist - just an awful teacher, and not very nice overall. It doesn't prevent one from being able to integrate complicated functions, apparently.