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Occlumency and singing
A mini-rant while I prepare for a bigger OotP one...
Reading the Occlumency chapters of OotP confirmed something I'd been thinking about for a while: magic is like singing. I say this because I'm taking singing lessons, and my gosh, singing must be totally hard to teach. Because most of what you have to do is internal, see, and it's hard to describe. So my teacher, who is really super good, keeps saying things like, "You have to flip the sound! Imagine that you're taking off a layer of your head, and flipping the sound," which... is just about as much help as it sounds. Especially when I was starting out, I spent a lot of time frustrated because I didn't get what she was saying, or how to translate it to what I feel like inside my own head. Now I can usually do it, but it took a while to get to that point.
Now let's imagine that my teacher, instead of getting along really well with me (at least, I hope she does-- she seems to!), and identifying with my problems (she's told me on numerous occasions that I have very similar problems to the ones she had when she started out), hates my guts and can barely stand to be in the same room with me, and is trying to teach me a discipline fraught with emotion, which if her student gets good at may allow me to do weird things to her. Yeah, kind of a recipe for disaster.
Snape's still a horrible teacher of Occlumency, but I can sympathize with him more now. And honestly if he had been a super good teacher Harry would probably still have been a horrible student ("All right, Potter... telling you to close your mind didn't work. Try visualizing flipping your head instead, perhaps that is a better mental picture." "Professor Snape, now not only do I think you're a git, I think you're a crazy git!") -- as I would have been a terrible singing student had I taken singing lessons before now. (You're talking to the girl who did not see the point in standing up straight while singing until a couple of years ago.)
Reading the Occlumency chapters of OotP confirmed something I'd been thinking about for a while: magic is like singing. I say this because I'm taking singing lessons, and my gosh, singing must be totally hard to teach. Because most of what you have to do is internal, see, and it's hard to describe. So my teacher, who is really super good, keeps saying things like, "You have to flip the sound! Imagine that you're taking off a layer of your head, and flipping the sound," which... is just about as much help as it sounds. Especially when I was starting out, I spent a lot of time frustrated because I didn't get what she was saying, or how to translate it to what I feel like inside my own head. Now I can usually do it, but it took a while to get to that point.
Now let's imagine that my teacher, instead of getting along really well with me (at least, I hope she does-- she seems to!), and identifying with my problems (she's told me on numerous occasions that I have very similar problems to the ones she had when she started out), hates my guts and can barely stand to be in the same room with me, and is trying to teach me a discipline fraught with emotion, which if her student gets good at may allow me to do weird things to her. Yeah, kind of a recipe for disaster.
Snape's still a horrible teacher of Occlumency, but I can sympathize with him more now. And honestly if he had been a super good teacher Harry would probably still have been a horrible student ("All right, Potter... telling you to close your mind didn't work. Try visualizing flipping your head instead, perhaps that is a better mental picture." "Professor Snape, now not only do I think you're a git, I think you're a crazy git!") -- as I would have been a terrible singing student had I taken singing lessons before now. (You're talking to the girl who did not see the point in standing up straight while singing until a couple of years ago.)