Lupin is not a stellar teacher either

[sunnyskywalker]

Introduction

This won’t be as polemic as my essay on McGonagall. But those darn Pinterest memes keep popping up, and some of them headcanon Lupin as this amazingly sensitive teacher who always spots when students are having a bad time and helps, and adapts his teaching style to any needs, and…sigh. Hogwart students could certainly use a teacher like that. Lupin seems like one of the best—let’s face it, one of the only—candidates. But let’s take a closer look.

How well does he get students to learn the material?

I’ll start with the good: when he’s in front of a sympathetic class, he seems to do a decent job of holding the kids’ attention, helping them remember what they’ve learned, and making them feel positively about the subject and their teacher. Fending off boggarts and grindylows might even be useful in daily life, and he gives them hands-on experience doing it. Well done! Even granting that the kids are comparing him to Quirrell (possibly okay with the material but boring) and Lockhart (unmitigated disaster in almost every way), this shows some talent.

But what about when he isn’t quite as knowledgeable about the subject, or his teaching style isn’t working for his audience, or the audience is uninterested or hostile? We see an example where the first two of those conditions apply, and the results are not great. Harry eventually learns to cast the Patronus Charm—but seemingly in spite of Lupin’s lessons.

First, Lupin gives Harry inaccurate information. He says the incantation will work “only if you are concentrating, with all your might, on a single, very happy memory.” But when Harry succeeds, he doesn’t use happy memories. At the Gryffindor versus Ravenclaw Quidditch match, he “doesn’t stop to think.” By the lake, he knows he’s already done it. In Little Whinging, he thinks of Ron and Hermione, but not specific happy memories. During his OWL, he imagines Umbridge being fired. So when Lupin says the charm only works if you concentrate on a happy memory, he’s wrong. Not thinking at all, being confident and able to visualize your success, thinking about what you want to live for, and picturing a happy but imaginary scenario also work—perhaps better than the “happy memory” method, which never works for Harry.

Lupin himself agrees that he’s no expert at fighting dementors. I think the “happy memory” method is a shortcut: happy memories usually remind people why they want to live and give them the strength and motivation to cast the charm. This got lost in translation or over-simplified when Lupin learned the charm, so “Happy memories may help produce the required mental state to cast a successful Patronus Charm” became “you have to think of a happy memory” in his muddled understanding.

Second, Lupin’s teaching method seems to actively prevent Harry from mastering the charm, plus inflicts emotional suffering. He has Harry try it once sans boggart, and Harry produces a little silver whisp. Then Lupin immediately escalates the difficulty and has Harry face the boggart-dementor every subsequent time over the course of “several” lessons. Later, seeing himself perform the charm successfully gives Harry enough confidence to drive off a whole swarm of dementors. If Lupin had continued the dry runs until Harry could cast a fully-formed Patronus and then pitted him against the boggart-dementor, therefore, Harry probably could have learned the charm after a lesson or two. Instead, Harry sees himself fail over and over again, sapping any confidence that would enable him to succeed. Worse, he repeatedly hears his parents’ deaths, loses consciousness, and ends lessons “drained and strangely empty.”

For comparison, after an incomplete single lesson in the D.A., Lavender and Neville are still at the “silver whisp” stage, Seamus casts a Patronus that lasts long enough for him to determine that it’s something hairy, and Cho and Hermione cast fully corporeal Patronuses. Two years after that, Dean and Seamus cast fully corporeal Patronuses under battlefield conditions. (We don’t know whether they practiced in the meantime.) They’re all older than thirteen, and we don’t know how second-year Dennis Creevey fared. But it does seem like working up to a corporeal Patronus before facing a real or boggart-simulated dementor is more effective.

But Lupin doesn’t change his method no matter how many times Harry passes out. Does he not think he should? Or does he not realize that there is another way, despite having used it initially? As I recall, this was an argument for Ever So Evil Lupin: if he really wanted to help Harry, he would have tried something else so the poor kid wouldn’t be repeatedly traumatized and forced unconscious; he didn’t, ergo he wanted Harry traumatized and failing (but trusting the person responsible for his torment). I think Lupin is incapable rather than evil, but it takes a pretty inflexible mindset to watch a kid hearing his parents die and fainting over and over and just forge ahead without even wondering whether there’s a different approach.

Now, there are mitigating factors. Hogwarts teaching standards seem pretty bad, so he probably was never exposed to alternate methods. The teachers’ schedules are so overloaded that they’re likely all permanently too frazzled and sleep-deprived to have the bandwidth for thinking about different approaches, and he’s extra-exhausted due to chronic illness. But the question isn’t whether he might be a better teacher with more support and training, it’s whether he’s an effective teacher already. He isn’t.

This raises the question of how well he actually knows the material he teaches in class and how well he responds to other non-ideal teaching situations. When he says that the Boggart-Banishing Charm works if you force the boggart to assume a shape you find amusing, is this another sometimes-true-but-misleading shortcut? We know from Molly Weasley’s experience at Grimmauld Place that casting it unsuccessfully can make the boggart change into a different, still-unfunny form. How would Lupin have handled that in class? And what about students whose learning methods don’t match Lupin’s teaching methods, or who have dyslexia or other challenges? What happens if students decide to mouth off in class instead of listening? We don’t know, but the Patronus lessons don’t inspire much confidence.

Sensitive to students’ emotional needs?

Speaking of boggarts, have you ever explained the boggart lesson to someone who hasn’t read the books or seen the movies? “So, you have a bunch of teenagers magically reveal their greatest fears to all of their classmates…” The expression of horror on their face says it all. Take another look at the lesson:

“Right, Neville,” said Professor Lupin. “First things first: what would you say is the thing that frightens you most in the world?”

Neville’s lips moved, but no noise came out.

“Didn’t catch that, Neville, sorry,” said Professor Lupin cheerfully.

Neville looked around rather wildly, as though begging someone to help him, then said, in barely more than a whisper, “Professor Snape.”

Nearly everyone laughed. Even Neville grinned apologetically.

So, would that be a weak, forced grin like the weak, forced laugh after he turned into a canary? That is, motivated by embarrassment and peer pressure rather than genuine amusement? Neville clearly does not want to admit this, and based on past experience, the class is laughing at him, not with him. Making a student the butt of a joke isn't good teaching.

Perhaps we’re meant to think that while risky, it bolsters Neville’s confidence, so it’s okay. He does look determined and lets out a “great ‘Ha!’ of laughter” on his second try. But we don’t see this having any effect after the lesson. We hear that Snape bullied Neville worse than ever in unspecified ways, but nothing about Neville holding up better. (Whereas Fake Moody’s encouragement does give Neville’s confidence a lasting boost.) We don’t hear about Lupin checking up on Neville or doing anything to find out whether Snape retaliates, either.

Worse, Lupin gets really lucky that the lesson goes this well. He asks about Gran’s clothes because he knows Neville’s parents are in St. Mungo’s. Suppose Neville had identified his worst fear incorrectly and the boggart turned into his parents staring blankly? Forcing Neville to reveal that in front of the class would be cruel. And trying to turn it into a joke—again, in public—would be downright offensive. Not every fear can be dismissed by mockery. Or what if his boggart was the Lestranges yelling “Crucio”? That wouldn’t be any better than a Voldemort-boggart. Either Lupin was supremely confident that Snape’s insult would guarantee Neville had no other fear in his mind at that moment, or he risked putting Neville through a deeply upsetting ordeal and possibly terrifying the whole class because humiliating Snape in public with teaching as an excuse was just too good to pass up.

And what about the other students? Even minor fears like spiders and banshees could be horribly embarrassing and provide fodder for bullying. But not everyone has only minor fears. As Lupin well knows! He may know that none of the students are werewolves, but any kid could have an equally traumatic experience. How many of them have relatives in Azkaban, or in St. Mungo’s like Neville’s parents, or were present when someone was attacked or killed like Harry was? How many have been attacked or sexually assaulted themselves? How many are afraid of monsters that Petrify people after what happened last year? (Lupin might not know the details, but he surely knows that something Petrified students and caused panic.) For that matter, could a boggart-basilisk Petrify someone?

(Side note: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald demonstrates how terrible this lesson is when Dumbledore gives it decades earlier. First we see Leta’s classmates relishing the chance to see what she fears so they can bully her about it. Then her fear is her baby brother drowning, which is difficult to turn into a joke. Also it’s horrible to ask a kid to do that in front of an audience. Which is probably why after Dumbledore looks at the drowning baby, the scene ends, leaving us with a lot of questions. Like whether Dumbledore suggested this lesson hoping Remus would spark some bullying and maybe frighten the class.)

Lupin belatedly realizes one of the risks when he stops Harry from facing the boggart—but he could have realized that earlier by looking at the class list. “Hm, Harry’s in this group. What if his boggart is Voldemort? Oh, and there’s Neville—his might be pretty terrifying too. Also the entire school might fear dementors now thanks to the incident on the train yesterday. Maybe I should have them face the boggart individually behind a screen or something. And what if I need to step in? Someone might realize that my boggart is the moon rather than a crystal ball…” Until the danger is right in his face, it doesn’t occur to him. The social humiliation aspect never does seem to sink in. Again, I think this was inexperience, not malice, but you can see where the Ever So Evil Lupin idea came from. And again, while it’s possible that he could improve with training and experience, his skill now at imagining how a lesson will affect students emotionally and reading their emotional states is poor.

In Loco Negligentis Parentis

Reassuring scared kids in general is a good thing. But it can be done well or poorly. We’ve seen that his approach with Neville wasn’t great and could have gone much worse. What about his explanation for why the dementors made Harry, but no one else, faint? “The dementors affect you worse than others because there are horrors in your past that the others don’t have.”

Even if Lupin knows about Harry’s fights with Quirrellmort and the basilisk, he knows Harry isn’t the only person on the train who’s experienced horrors. Lupin surely remembers being savaged by a werewolf, the terror and pain of his first transformation, and the realization that he might be isolated his whole life. He didn’t even come close to fainting. He probably knows that several students (including Hermione) were Petrified last year and perhaps that Ginny was nearly killed somehow in the Chamber of Secrets. They didn’t come close to fainting either. He can reasonably assume that at least a few kids on that train have suffered traumas he doesn’t know about. (Like Neville’s family repeatedly trying to kill him and Luna seeing her mother accidentally kill herself, for example.) So the “horrors” in Harry’s past can’t be the reason he and he alone fainted. Saying so may make Harry feel better, but it isn’t true.

If Harry genuinely had suffered uniquely, Lupin’s statement might be helpful. Besides reassuring Harry, it could help him understand that his friends don’t mean to ignore or make light of his experiences, but honestly don’t get it. This understanding could improve Harry’s relations with the other students. But his suffering isn’t unique. Telling Harry that his schoolmates’ harrowing experiences don’t compare to his own seems more likely to cause misunderstandings and emotionally distance Harry from other students. Maybe Lupin is flattering Harry by instinct rather than design. Either way, he isn’t thinking it through.

Lupin also overlooks a potential danger. Harry telling him that the memory the dementors dredged up was of Voldemort murdering his parents ought to raise questions. Why not the far more recent memories of Quirrellmort and the basilisk? If Lupin doesn’t know about those, what horrors in Harry’s past did he think were so uniquely awful? Why does he believe an incident Harry couldn’t understand at the time would be his worst memory? Harry was fifteen months old. He didn’t know what death meant. Mummy screamed, and then a scary stranger made a green light and she feel down, and then another green light made his head hurt and the ceiling fall. Bad, yes, but worse than anything else Harry has ever experienced? This is even weirder since most people can’t remember anything that happened at that age. Lupin may not be current on child development research, but he almost certainly doesn’t remember being a baby. A truly stellar teacher would realize that wait, something strange is going on here. Maybe it’s time to consult Madam Pomfrey? Or at least read up on dementors and find out whether anyone has ever fainted from a brief encounter with one, and if so why, and is there anything besides the Patronus Charm to treat the problem? Lupin and Pomfrey would probably fail to discover that the strange reaction is due to Harry carrying a piece of Voldemort’s soul, but at least trying would show that Lupin was aware a problem existed.

So much for dangers he doesn’t suspect. What about the dangers everyone knows about? Though Lupin doesn’t deliberately set students up to be possible murder victims as punishment, he endangers far more students than McGonagall through inaction. Let’s be generous and blame forgetting his potion on the DADA curse for the moment. Why didn’t he tell anyone about the secret tunnels for ten months?

It’s a strange omission from the Shrieking Shack exposition. Lupin knows all about the tunnels; he helped write the map. Yet he says he hoped that Sirius was using “Dark Arts he learned from Voldemort” to break into the school and that “being an Animagus had nothing to do with it,” with no mention of tunnels. Did he really think Sirius trotted through the front doors without anyone noticing a bear-sized dog at their heels, then hid in the castle until after curfew to attack? Isn’t it more likely that he broke into Honeydukes or used another tunnel? Lupin saw Harry shortly after Harry got back from Hogsmeade with mud on his hands, a bag of Honeydukes candy, and the Marauder’s Map, and he probably heard Draco’s complaints that Potter got away with sneaking out of the castle within a day or two. He knows that Harry didn’t turn into an animal to sneak in or out; at least one tunnel had to be usable and unwatched. Whether he dared tell Dumbledore about Sirius’s dog form or not is a moot point. Why not ask Dumbledore if he knows about the tunnels? Or heck, why not ask the whole staff at once?

Unless there’s something he and Sirius aren’t telling us, they never used the tunnels during full moon nights. Did it really, truly not occur to him at any point between Halloween and June that Sirius could use the tunnels in human form, and therefore talking about the tunnels meant revealing nothing more than that the Marauders used to sneak into Hogsmeade to buy candy? The Animagus secret would be safe. Was he so desperate to kill Sirius personally that he didn’t want anyone else to catch Sirius first, no matter the cost?

Or was there something about their use of the tunnels that was so dangerous or wrong that he couldn’t possibly talk about it without implicating himself? Like, did one or more of the Marauders commit some horrible crime in Hogsmeade in front of witnesses, but since it was supposedly impossible for them to have left school grounds, everyone thought Polyjuiced imposters did it? But if Lupin reveals his knowledge of the tunnels now, everyone will realize that the Marauders could have committed the crime after all, and they’ll reasonably suspect that he's still Sirius’s criminal accomplice now?

Whatever the reason, it looks bad: he’s known all along about secret tunnels into the school, and didn’t mention it even after Sirius Black broke in twice and apparently nearly stabbed a kid to death.

Conclusion

So why does Lupin have a reputation as sensitive and caring? I think a combination of the Harry filter, timing, and luck contributes.

Harry is our viewpoint character, so naturally it’s easiest to take his feelings about other characters as truth. He’s delighted to see Snape humiliated and likes the person who set that up. He doesn’t feel bad when Neville looks around as if begging for help or when “the class” (including Harry?) laughs at him, so that’s easy to ignore. The apparent success when Neville laughs seems to retroactively justify Lupin’s pushing him. Harry doesn’t wonder whether Lupin even cares if Snape retaliates, let alone tries to find out or stop it, so it’s easy for us to speed along without wondering that either. Or about how much of his motivation was helping Neville versus using Neville to go after Snape. Discovering that Professor Lupin was his father’s friend makes Harry feel positively about him, because surely any friend of James is a great guy. Only much, much later do we get information to make us wonder whether it’s the opposite—that we should mistrust anyone who was friends with James.

Harry also feels that Lupin is kind and helpful and understands him. Well, Lupin correctly divines that Harry is worried that Lupin thought he couldn’t handle the boggart. But that isn’t a difficult insight—lots of teenagers would feel that way. And if Harry’s emotional reactions are anything like James’s, Lupin might be instinctively running on his old “what would James think” script and getting lucky that it works. But Harry has almost no experience of adults even caring how he feels, so Lupin’s attention seems remarkable to him.

Lupin tells Harry that fearing dementors means Harry fears fear itself, which is very wise, and that he’s impressed. Harry also has almost no experience of adults saying approving things about him. But does it actually mean that Harry fears fear? Couldn’t it mean that Harry fears scary monsters that look like the Grim Reaper, dredge up traumatic memories, and make him faint? That isn’t quite the same thing. Especially when you factor in the unknown—he’s only just learned about dementors, so what else can they do? Oh, they can also suck out your soul? That’s reasonable to fear… In other words, this is another case of Lupin flattering Harry.

Then there’s timing. Imagine that before the boggart class, Harry heard Parvati tell Lavender, “My cousin said her mum went to school with Professor Lupin, and she said he was part of a popular crowd that hexed Snape all the time. They can’t be pleased to work together now!” The boggart scene would read very differently. We’d suspect Lupin’s motives from the start. By saving their history until later and doling it out over several books, we get the image of Lupin as the guy who helps downtrodden kids purely out of kindness firmly cemented before we see anything to challenge it.

The narrative never reevaluates Lupin’s earlier actions in the light of new information, so we’re not encouraged to either. And skimming over the fallout of the lesson with a single brief aside about Snape denies us that narrative pause to go, “Hey, Neville doesn’t look like imagining Snape in in a dress is helping him handle this any better than before,” or, “Wait, did Professor Lupin really just drop Neville in it and not even check up on him later?”

Sometimes the timing aspect is glossed over in an especially suspicious way. Lupin’s tale of the evening he forgot to take his potion skips right over the part where he had time after dinner to drink it before he even started watching the map. If he’d set the potion on his desk, trying to work himself up to drinking the foul stuff but being interrupted by Peter’s surprise appearance, the plot outcome would have been the same. But he didn’t pick it up—that’s why Snape came to deliver it—even though he thought he might have to rush off to save the kids from Sirius. That means he didn’t leave himself any time when he could go get it. Which makes you wonder whether he was secretly hoping to tear Sirius to bits. But he skims over this so quickly that we don’t have time to work it out before we get sucked into emotional revelations and action-packed escapes. Harry never thinks about it again, so it’s easy for us to go with the emotional impression we got—focused on the moment of seeing Peter’s name and rushing off—instead of examining Lupin’s actual words and spotting the missing downtime.

And, of course, there’s luck. You know how if a parked car rolls harmlessly backward into a curb, people say it’s an accident that could happen to any of us, but if it sideswipes another car and knocks over a fire hydrant, suddenly the driver is a carless jerk who should have checked that the parking break was set? Lupin is the first guy. He gets lucky that no student unexpectedly reveals a terrible fear during the boggart lesson. He gets lucky that Neville rallies rather than having his boggart change to reveal a different, perhaps scarier fear. He gets lucky that no gossip about his schooldays reaches Harry. (I went to a small school. Count on it—there is gossip.) He gets lucky that we never see him trying—maybe failing—to teach belligerent Slytherins. He gets lucky that his Patronus lessons don’t damage Harry’s confidence so much that Harry can’t cast it when the dementors attack. He gets lucky that those same lessons don’t do worse emotional damage or cause a Voldiebit-related problem. He gets lucky that even with the endless reminiscing about school, he doesn’t transform until they’re safely out of the tunnel and everyone can escape him. If his luck had failed in any of those circumstances, we’d probably have reevaluated everything else he said and did and judged him more harshly. Or at least been less confident in his supportive intentions and sensitivity.

Oh, yes, and he’s also lucky that both Dumbledore and Snape make themselves accessories after the fact to multiple felonies by covering up his confession about the full moon romps and his knowledge of the secret tunnels and Sirius’s Animagus form.

Not as lucky as he would like, perhaps, since Dumbledore’s most loyal follower exposes just enough of Lupin’s story to force him to resign, which probably-not-coincidentally provides the perfect cover story for joining the werewolf pack to spy. Dumbledore knew the Defense job was cursed when he offered it to Lupin, so he might have had something like this outcome in mind all along. Add Lupin to the list of people Dumbledore has manipulated and used. I think Lupin’s reluctance to tell Dumbledore about the Animagus backstory was his instincts warning him that it’s dangerous to cross Dumbledore, no matter how much he consciously buys into the myth of Albus the Kindly Giver-of-Second-Chances.

This makes Lupin more sympathetic, but it doesn’t make him a great teacher. He’s still inflexible in method, insensitive to students’ emotions, unaware of danger if there’s an alternate explanation more flattering to someone whose good opinion he wants, and either unwilling or incapable of protecting students from a mass-murderer even when he can reveal enough to help with little risk to himself.