By Joshua Christianson
Last time we took a look at how a few teachers at Hogwarts ran their classrooms and discovered the importance of putting your students’ growth first and believing in them. This time we have three more whose passion and structure, or lack of either, had major impacts on the way their students learned.
Binns – The Banality of Bad Teaching
There is a relatively unknown professor who I’ve wanted to call out for a long time: Professor Binns, the ghost who teaches History of Magic. He is a teacher so thoroughly boring in the books that he wasn’t included once in any of the movies. The only interesting thing about him is that he is a ghost, and the books say that he died only for his spirit to rise up and continue teaching as if nothing had happened.
As a teacher, he is unconnected with his students (forgetting their names mere moments after hearing them), uninspiring, and long-winded. The only emotion he ever seems to express in the books is astonishment when his students ask him questions. Rowling says she based him off of a teacher she had who gave classes with his eyes closed, disgorging his immense knowledge while rocking back and forth on his toes… While never lacking any structure in his classes, if Binns had any passion whatsoever for his subject not a drop of it was ever conveyed to his students. Suffice it to say, very few of Binns’ students learned anything from him, and his disconnected, unemotional, meaningless teaching practice should be something all real teachers strive to avoid.
Hagrid – Clumsy Teaching with Passion
One of the biggest unsung heroes in the entire series, Hagrid’s courage, kindness, and love for others gives him the one thing as a teacher which Professor Binns lacks: Passion. Sure, his love for dragons, three-headed dogs, giant spiders, monster books, blast ended skrewts, and giants did put Harry in a fair amount of danger over the years, but Hagrid’s classes were rarely boring.
Barely educated, with no teaching experience at all, Hagrid still had a deep love for his subject which energized everything he did. He had the heart of a great teacher, and in his best moments inspired a tenderness for misunderstood creatures in his students too. Maybe with a bit more time in the role and some guidance from the other teachers he would have been the best Magical Creatures teacher to teach at Hogwarts, but sadly we only get to see his early career and… Well, it’s not great. Harry, Ron and Hermione, his favorite and best students, still dropped his class in their 6th year, indicating that a teacher’s love for their subject is not enough on its own. Structure, balance, and the ability to assess student capabilities are still essential aspects of a good learning environment, and things Hagrid never managed to master in the series.
Moody / Barty Crouch Jr. – The Harsh and Terrible
If Binns was emotionless and Hagrid overly passionate, another of Harry’s teachers implemented a different feeling in their classroom: fear. In his fourth year Harry is taught by a man he believed to be Mad-Eye Moody, but who is ultimately revealed to be Barty Crouch Jr, an evil and notorious servant of Lord Voldemort. His style is hard to analyze because it is difficult to tell if it was his own or Moody’s. I think that it was a mix of both- the real strictness of Moody, mimicked well enough to fool Dumbledore, fueled by a legitimately broken psyche intent on instilling fear and doing harm. Demonstrating in his first class how to torture, mind control, and kill, this fake Moody was actually well-received by his students for what was seen as his brutal honesty. For some like Neville, though, this terrifying demonstration was downright traumatizing. He went on to practice the Imperius curse on his own students, demanding that they find a way to overcome it on their own.
Yet, strangely, Barty Crouch Jr., on the whole, was an effective teacher. Keeping order in class, providing students with useful skills and information, and even offering encouragement to Neville and Harry that helped them grow, his stolen motto of “Constant Vigilance” served his students well in the end. What can we make of this? Perhaps that fear actually does have a place in the classroom… In a magic world of Dragons, Basilisks and escaped dark wizards unknown dangers lurk around every corner for new students at Hogwarts. By shining a light into the darkness and showing his students exactly what terrible things are in there Crouch failed to make them more afraid. Instead, a fear of the unknown became a fear of the known. And with that knowledge, it became easier for the students to see just what they might be up against, and how to prepare for it.
This is the surprising lesson of Mad-Eye Moody, that even Crouch couldn’t undermine with his cruelty. Children- and people in general- crave structure. And if they are left alone with their fears, unable to structure them, they suffer more in the chaos. In real life, we should not be afraid of structuring student fears either. By naming terrible things we help others. Slavery. War. Hate. Like the name of Voldemort, fear of the name increases fear of the thing itself. To foster genius we must illuminate the things we fear and meet them face to face because when we do others can follow our lead.
From Binns’ structure without passion to Hagrid’s passion without structure, and finally to Moody’s structure and passion together, there has been a lot to learn from such different characters. Next time, in the final and third part of this series, we’ll dive into the best and the very worst Hogwarts had to offer and see what final lessons we can glean.