Why was Snape such a Bad Teacher?!

I blame the system.

Hogwart’s is not a university; it’s more like a boarding school or English ‘public’ school (a la Eton, Winchester, etc). Ingrained in this system is the time honored tradition of hazing. Mostly this is done by older students to younger students, who then perpetuate the cycle when they become older students. Snape was so horribly hazed all though his students days that he’s never managed to break the cycle, and is still acting like one of the older students. I attended boarding school as a student and lived as spouse and faculty in one for four years, so I know that such behavior is not uncommon (although Snape is obviously an extreme example).

That’s not to say I think Snape is a good teacher. I’m not sure anyone but the Slitherins (sp?) thinks that he is (maybe Dumbledore, but he sees the light in everyone). Snape is definitely being underhanded in his teaching methods, but Snape is nothing if not underhanded, even if he’s essentially a ‘good guy’. He’s immature and horribly insecure, which leads him to use an out of date textbook that he knows he can ‘best’.

Poor Snape is just a product of the broken English wizardary and witchcraft schooling system.

I don’t think Drew’s point makes sense as Harry had trouble with potions when taught by Snape as well. Just getting the textbook shouldn’t suddenly turn him into a potion master unless the information was quantifiably different than his previous instruction.

The convention for old manuscript of magic and alchemy containing lost secrets seems to be what Rowling seems to be trying to invoke. Unfortunately a world where magic is now a science and taught in Universities has implications that I think she missed in this case.

Err… isnt Snape who kills Dumbledore? It seemed, at Half Blood Prince that he was evil after all.

I always assumed he was a bad teacher — and he was, for more reasons than that, as far as I’m concerned (playing favorites is not ok) — because he hated his job. He doesn’t want to be teaching potions, and he seems to be at Hogwarts due to concerns other than what he wants to do for a living. And while he’s certainly very clever and very good at making potions, being good at something doesn’t make you a good teacher of it. I had a geometry teacher like that. She knew the subject backwards and forwards, she just couldn’t communicate her knowledge well to people who didn’t have a good grasp of how math and logic worked. There were only two of us who consistently understood the lesson and what she wanted us to do. When she’d finished lecturing, she’d tell us to form groups to work on things, and the two of us who’d really gotten it would go around and explain it to people three or four at a time. She played favorites, too, just like Snape (and the other kid who got it and I were the favorites, hands down). Good mathematician, bad teacher; just like Snape is a good potion-maker but a bad potions-teacher.

Snape a lazy dick of a teacher??? Lazy no, selfish yes! Maybe he refused to teach the students the correct version. After all, you can’t be the best if everyone knows your secret. Furthermore, why should he share such valuable, hard-earned knowledge? The little buggers wouldn’t appreciate it! He is there to teach the standard. If the standard sucks, oh well. Finally, it’s possible he wanted to save that knowledge to publish his own book of potions someday. Imagine the money he’d make!

What is a good teacher? One who prepares her/his students for the future. I think a solid case could be made for Snape as Harry’s most valuable teacher. So what if he violates half of the Best Practices niceties? When Harry screws up a lesson, it’s because he’s let Snape get to him, and Snape makes him redo the lesson. Harry learns how to do the potion, AND, much more valuably, how to deal with someone who is not nice and who is making his life difficult. Surely no better practice dummy exists for duels with Voltemort?