Order of the Phoenix: Page 233
Snape's terrible pedagogical philosophy, how the trio never really learned Potions, Snape's shockingly conscientious choice, and Harry's not-so-bad Draught of Peace.
Welcome back! I hope I can brighten your Friday morning with an on-time issue of Potter Pages. We’re covering page 233 of Order of the Phoenix, which is yet another abusive Potions lesson. Enjoy — if that’s the right word — and subscribe!
Usually, the way school works is that you learn things that you didn’t previously know, and then you continue to learn things that you can now learn based on the things you’ve already learned, and you just keep adding on knowledge until you graduate or become an English major. The teacher introduces a topic, and then you learn how it works, and once you know that topic well enough, you take a test on it, and you do a great job, and you move on to the next topic, which builds on the previous topic. It’s a pretty simple model, but it works pretty well.
I mention this because apparently, this isn’t how Potions at Hogwarts works at all. The start of page 233 of Order of the Phoenix provides a perfect example. It begins in the middle of a Snape quote:
-wand again — “in the store cupboard” — (the door of the said cupboard sprang open) — “you have an hour and a half...start.”
(“the said” cupboard...is that a typo? I would just write “the cupboard” or “said cupboard.” But whatever.)
So basically, the way potions works at Hogwarts, at least under Snape’s tutelage, is that Snape tells them to make potions, and then they go ahead and start. We almost never see him actually teaching; the recipe is up on the board, and Snape’s job is to say “on your mark, get set, go!”
This is thrown into stark relief in Half-Blood Prince, when Professor Slughorn takes over. One class, Slughorn brings up Golpalott’s Third Law, which states — I’m doing this from memory; please clap — that “the antidote to a blended poison is more than the antidote to the sum of its parts.”
Interlude: here’s the actual quote from Hermione: "The antidote for a blended poison will be equal to more than the sum of the antidotes for each of the separate components." So I wasn’t perfect, but that’s pretty darn close.
Anyway, Slughorn brings it up, and it’s notable because it’s not just a recipe...it’s a concept. You know, the kind of thing a teacher would actually have to teach, like “The Monroe Doctrine” or “The Sine rule.” The kind of thing students might have questions about. The kind of thing maybe the teacher would have helpful examples or activities to illustrate. Maybe you’d spend four lessons going over the finer points of Golpalott’s third law and what they meant, and then do some practical activities to understand them further, and then take a test on it. Instead, Snape just never seems to mention it. If he does, he doesn’t do a good job, because when Slughorn brings it up, the entire class besides Hermione is completely dumbfounded.
On this page, we’ve got Snape literally just telling the class where the ingredients are, then sending them on their way. Where’s the lesson? Where’s the practical instruction on the right way to stir a potion; the right way to tend your fire; the right way to measure out liquid; how different ingredients work together? If it’s just a blind race to make the least-bad potion possible, then this is barely a potions lesson at all. It’s just a test of who can go the longest without making a mistake while reading directions.
The analogous class to Potions in the muggle world is a weird combination of chemistry and cooking. “Food science,” let’s say. Can you imagine if a food science teacher came into a class on the first day of the year and said “make me a baked Alaska — instructions on the board — ingredients in the closet — go!” Of course not. The whole point of liberal education is that you don’t just learn the rote skills necessary to accomplish tasks; you gain knowledge and contextual understanding of what you’re doing. If you’re making a potion, you should be able to do more than follow a list of instructions and hope it all works out. You should know why the potion works the way it does, and exactly how each step works, and why.
Now, Snape could also take things too far in the other direction: he could teach so much context and background information that the subject no longer has anything to do with potions. He could basically be the potions equivalent of a high school physics teacher showing his students video of a ballet because he thinks the dancers move like charged particles. Obviously he’s not going to, since he’s Severus Snape, but it’s still good to be aware that there’s potential to go wrong in both directions. All I can say is, it’s no wonder Potions never turns out to be that important to the plot of the books.
I can hear you screaming already, so let me clarify. Obviously, certain potions are important at some points — most notably Polyjuice Potion, which causes all sorts of nonsense — but not for the trio, or really, anyone who studied potions under Snape. Harry, Ron, and Hermione utilize the skills they’ve learned in Charms, Defense Against the Dark Arts, Transfiguration, Herbology, Care of Magical Creatures, even on the quidditch field — but they never really pull out a Potions trick in a key moment. Because they never learned any. Well, Hermione does sometimes, but she learned those from books on her own time, not in Snape’s lessons.
The potion Snape has them mixing is the Draught of Peace, to calm anxiety. Right off the bat, that seems like a strange potion for Snape to teach. Then again, in an interesting way, Snape’s potion choices have never reflected his bullying character. The first potion he ever has his class make is a potion to cure boils. There are all kinds of potions in Snape’s lessons — shrinking solution, swelling solution, strengthening solution, etc. — but it’s important to note that they’re not all evil or malevolent. Snape doesn’t really teach anything, but at least the potions he has his classes make are genuinely useful and wide-ranging.
The Draught of Peace, in fact, is an almost shockingly conscientious choice for Snape at the beginning of OWL year. Everyone knows this is one of the most stressful school years, but out of all the characters, the one doing the most to calm agitation and soothe fifth-years’ nerves is Severus Snape? It’s such a strange thing to say that it almost feels like Snape would have to reconsider, purely to avoid looking soft and caring to students and fellow teachers. Imagine the conversations in the staff room:
Flitwick: “The fifth-years seem on-edge, don’t they? My speech today on OWLs nearly had some of them crying.”
McGonagall: “Yes, I started them on vanishing spells, quite complex...we’ll see if they all make it. Severus, what about yours?”
Snape: “I had them mix a Draught of Peace, a potion to calm anxiety and soothe agitation.”
McGonagall: “Severus, that’s...actually, I mean...Severus, are you feeling all right?”
Of course, if the potion calms the nerves, the making of the potion could hardly be more stressful. The fire has to stay at exactly the right level; the ingredients have to be added in exactly the right amounts and order; the mixture has to be stirred exactly the right number of times, first clockwise then counterclockwise.
That all makes some sense to me except the multidirectional stirring, because of what it implies. If you stir something up, eventually it’s all going to be mixed more or less evenly no matter which direction you stir. Obviously the students are working with magic ingredients, so there are more stirring issues to consider, but still, there’s no ingredient-based reason that which direction you stir would have any impact on the final product. Thus, the only reason that it can possibly matter which way you stir is that the ingredients are somehow aware of which direction you’re stirring. We see more stirring weirdness in book six, when Slughorn has the class brew the Draught of Living Death. Harry, reading from Snape’s book, adds a clockwise stir once every six counterclockwise stirs, and his potion immediately turns much paler. A single stir can’t do that to normal ingredients. The ingredients know.
Sure, everything is magic, so there’s a lot more room for strange things like ingredients being aware and caring which direction they’re stirred. At the same time, though, even in the wizarding world, there’s something really strange about brewing a potion whose ingredients know that they’re being brewed into a potion.
You know that the Draught of Peace is done when a light, silver vapor is issuing from the cauldron. As the class ends, Hermione’s potion is perfect; Ron’s cauldron is spitting green sparks; Seamus’ fire has gone out. Harry’s cauldron, meanwhile, is issuing “copious amounts of dark gray steam.”
This scene really illustrates just how far out of his way Snape goes to pick on Harry. Compared to the various other cauldrons in the class, “dark gray steam” is not that different from “light silver vapor.” This is quite clearly intentional on J.K. Rowling’s part. Harry is literally closer than anyone besides Hermione to brewing the potion correctly. There’s more vapor than there should be, and it’s darker than it should be; that’s the only problem. Ron’s potion is spitting green sparks, for goodness’ sake, and I can’t even imagine what Neville’s potion looks like. So of course, Snape decides to stop in front of Harry’s cauldron and ask, “Potter, what is this supposed to be?”
I mean, defend Snape all you want if it makes you happy. Praise him as a complicated man who overcame bullying of his own and went on to save the wizarding world. But the guy is just an ass. It really is that simple. Snape is mad that Harry’s father ended up with a girl he obsessed over, so 20 years later, when Harry makes what is actually a pretty passable potion, Snape decides to mock him relentlessly for it. Sure, he got picked on as a child. His parents were in an abusive relationship. That doesn’t stop him from being an utter jerk.
Harry, of course, responds “the draught of peace,” because — this bears repeating — he’s actually made a pretty good potion. He’s panicked at the end of class, even before Snape comes around, because the vapor coming off his cauldron is slightly too dark. Imagine the mental abuse he’s endured for years to make that level of fear of failure happen. It has to be almost literally every class. Snape comes around, gets to Harry’s cauldron, and finds something to mock. I repeat, defend him all you want.
“Tell me, Potter,” Snape says, “can you read?” Malfoy laughs. With his fingers clenched tightly around his wand, Harry answers that yes, he can read. Snape tells Harry to read the third line of the instructions, and Harry, squinting through the smoke filling the dungeon so much that he can barely see, tries to read it — and that’s where the page ends. Evidently, Snape couldn’t even go to the trouble of assigning a potion that was in the textbook, so that students didn’t have to squint through a dark, smoke-filled dungeon to see the recipe.
This is a very Snape-heavy page, which frankly, doesn’t make for a lot of fun. Snape sucks. I’m sorry. He’s bad on so many levels: not only is he absolutely terrible to Harry, and to a lesser extent all Gryffindors, and to a yet lesser extent everyone besides the Slytherins, he’s also just a bad teacher. When he was at school, he filled an entire book — actually, two books, presumably; he must have marked up “Magical Drafts and Potions” just as much as he did “Advanced Potion-Making” — with potions tips and tricks of his own invention. But does he pass on the things he’s discovered? Does he do any kind of meaningful instructing at all? The way it appears in the books, Snape’s job could be done by any functioning adult. When he corrects students, it’s usually after they’ve already made irreversible mistakes, and it’s almost always to mock them. There’s a reason that during OWLs, Harry finds it far easier to brew a potion when Snape is no longer in the room.
There’s a lot of debate about Snape: whether he’s good, and if so, how good how he felt about Lily; how he felt about James; whether those feelings were justified; et cetera. But the one thing people don’t seem to talk about, for some reason, is the thing that’s hardest to deny. He’s a great wizard, but a terrible person, and a pretty bad teacher too.