Padfoot's Breed

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

Rowling never specified what breed of dog Sirius' Animagus form was, and 'a bear-like black dog' doesn't do much to narrow the field of possibilities. However, if we assume that the transformation closely reflects the wizard's personality, and perhaps reinforces it, I think I might have identified our mystery breed.

Meet the Russian Newfoundland, also called the Moscow Water Dog:

http://www.easypetmd.com/doginfo/moscow-water-dog

The result of a breeding experiment crossing Newfoundlands, East European Shepherds, and Caucasian Shepherds to create an all-purpose work and rescue dog by the Soviet Army during the 1950's, the Russian Newfoundland is now extinct.

What was this breed like while extant?

"This new breed proved to be an excellent swimmer, as well as a vigilant, trainable and intelligent shoreline sentry dog, and well able to withstand arctic temperatures and freezing water."

Strong swimming skills and high tolerance of freezing water - escaped from Azkaban by swimming the North Sea.

Intelligent - his teachers acknowledged him as bright, however much trouble he caused. The Marauders' Map is nothing to laugh at either.

Vigilant – before he was addled by Dementors he was certainly more attentive than James during their assault on Snape.

Trainable – this is the crux, isn't it? We don't know much about the dynamics between Sirius and James, but Peter was able to play him like a harp, and even Remus could control him when he bothered to exert himself. So, it seems that he was eminently manageable by those who knew him well and who he considered 'pack.'

And the Moscow Water Dog was infamous for being very selective about who they would acknowledge as pack, and how hostile they were toward strangers.

How hostile?

"...when set loose to rescue a panicked and drowning sailor, it was the breed's nature to swim straight to them and attack them in the water. A terrifying experience for the victim, who if they did not drown fighting off the dog would then likely try and drown the dog in order to defend themselves from the onslaught of gnashing teeth."

I'm sure those Muggle policemen in the prequel could sympathize deeply. As could Snape, and Kreacher, and....

In summation:

"As it would turn out, the Russian Water Dog was too much working dog and not enough rescue dog, the breed was aggressive and took very poorly to strangers, regardless of whether they were drowning or on land."

Yes, I believe that fits Sirius rather well.

Comments

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

If your goal for a school is to have the children come out of it properly educated, an adequately sized teaching staff is absolutely essential.

A student-teacher ratio which is too high leads to:

*increased disciplinary problems. The more children there are, the more difficult it is for a teacher to keep an eye on all of them.

*less individualized attention to the needs of the children.

---Faster learners are forced to linger over material they've already mastered while their classmates catch up. This can lead to boredom, inattention, and disengagement from the learning process.

---Slower learners may never receive the personalized help they need to catch up to their classmates. They fall further and further behind, and may find themselves unable to master material they would otherwise be capable of due to the lack of individualized lessons.

---Students' idiosyncratic difficulties, such as Neville's fear of his own magic, may be overlooked entirely due to the distraction of having so many students to care for at once. If they are recognized as extant, the teacher may lack the time and resources to either fully comprehend the problem or to address it.

*learning being primarily passive, listening to the teacher lecture.

*students being more frequently off-task, especially low-attaining students.

All effects of class size are most pronounced among already low attaining students, .e.g. those students already exhibiting difficulties in their academic careers whether due to laziness or deeper difficulties..

When there is insufficient staff to adequately support all students, teachers have little choice but to simplify the curriculum relative to what could be covered in order to minimize the number of students left behind. Pass rates for OWLs and NEWTs say very little about how thorough the curriculum is if the tests themselves have been neutered.

Supporting the idea that there used to be a larger staff is the fact (admittedly from Pottermore) that there used to be a Transfiguration Department which both Dumbledore and McGonagall belonged to. In Harry's day it appears to be only McGonagall, a reduction of at least one.

There's also a significant difference between reducing the number of staff and cancelling a class entirely. While only a fraction of the more engaged parents and officials may pay close attention to how many teachers are available and recognize the implications, almost everyone with a passing interest in the school will notice a cancellation and wonder about the reasons. And Dumbledore hates accounting for his actions to anyone.

Even then, canon can still support an interpretation that classes have been removed. In real life, when downsizing leads to the dismissal of teachers and classes, the first to go are almost always the art and music classes. Which Hogwarts lacks entirely. It doesn't even teach basic grammar and writing skills, let alone literature.

(Also, why would Dumbledore lie about discontinuing Divination? What does he gain from that?)

And of course, everything is the teachers' fault for being inadequate, not the parties responsible for depriving those teachers of the tools they need to do their jobs in the first place.

I agree that Albus kept Binns around to discourage students from developing and interest in history, and to keep them as far away from the 20th century, and his own major failings therein, as possible.



Setting all that aside, why would Albus want more teachers under his control? They're stuck at Hogwarts most of the year, making them useful for scut-work only for a few months during the summer. It's much more useful for him to have lackeys scattered throughout the ministry or pursuing independent ventures, like Mrs. Figg and Mundungus Fletcher, who he can tap for their resources throughout the year.

[lynn-waterfall.livejournal.com]

I agree that having enough teachers is necessary for a school to work well. However, I don't agree that having enough teachers is sufficient. (Well, maybe if you had one teacher for every 3-4 students and the teacher was trying at all, but that isn't what we're talking about.) If Dumbledore wanted students to be taught badly, he could do that and have a few more teachers, if he wanted more teacher-minions.

To illustrate, I really don't think that the school would be any better run if Lupin had stayed on permanently in some capacity. Slughorn in addition to Severus and the DADA-teacher-du-jour *might* have made the place better, but quite possibly not.

> (Also, why would Dumbledore lie about discontinuing Divination? What does he gain from that?)

He has seen to it that everyone views Divination as stupid and unreliable. By saying that he was planning to stop offering it, he's reinforcing that view. He also sounds wiser and less bound by tradition if he was planning to get rid of a useless subject -- two things that are important to his image.

> Setting all that aside, why would Albus want more teachers under his control? They're stuck at Hogwarts most of the year, making them useful for scut-work only for a few months during the summer. It's much more useful for him to have lackeys scattered throughout the ministry or pursuing independent ventures...

It isn't an either-or, teachers or people outside of Hogwarts. For that matter, if there were more "extra" teachers at Hogwarts, the teachers he did have would have more flexibility in their schedules: give the *other* person teaching Transfiguration to take on some additional classes, while McGonagall goes off to do something.

I don't know for sure that Dumbledore would want more teachers, but it strikes me as odd to assume that he'd want fewer.

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

Of course having more teachers isn't sufficient. However, I thought I had already shown that the teachers he did hire were largely incompetent. Having fewer teachers available exacerbated the problem. It's a question of cumulative effects.

The real question is, what is the trade-off in benefits for Albus between having a scarce handful, at best, of personal minions trapped at school for most of the year vs an entire population that is woefully undereducated and poorly equipped to run a functioning society?

It's also important to keep in mind that Dumbledore does have to answer to the school governors, no matter how much he likes to pretend at omnipotence and omniscience. They removed him entirely in CoS, though (Albus claimed) they reinstated him once they panicked about a student's death. If Albus brought in more teachers to make his flunkeys' schedules more flexible, he would have to justify their absences. Opponents like Malfoy would jump on such a concrete example of Dumbledore placing his own personal agenda ahead of his duties to the school.

Most of my argument comes from familiarity with the tactics used to hobble public schools in the US as an excuse to privatize them. First, starve them of funding through budget cuts. This leaves students without necessary classroom resources, including adequate teaching staff.

At the same time, push standardized testing (multiple choice in our world, possibly practical spell performance in the WW) for a more 'objective' way to measure student accomplishment. This forces teachers to teach for the test instead of offering a rounded education. One of the first things to be lost in that trade is the nurturing of critical thinking skills and general problem solving abilities.

When student performance begins to suffer (as predicted,) blame the mess on teachers' unions and other school administrative staff. Replace the most capable resistors with private flunkeys or instigate a new round of budget cuts and 'restructuring' to 'solve' the problem, when in reality these actions serve only to exacerbate it - assuming one defined the original problem as a failure to provide our students with a thorough, liberal education.

The end result is a population well-trained to regurgitate answers on demand, but ill-equipped to solve them on their own, or to navigate propaganda or other spurious, fallacious arguments.

Authoritarian interests of all stripes are vested in such an outcome, because it makes it easier for them to manipulate the people. Additionally, fragmenting the school system makes it easier to institute, let's call them "alternative" standards, such as religious fundamentalists who would rather teach creationism than evolution.

We haven't been exposed to any of the usual arguments about the need to downsize schools or "reform" education, but the more I look at it the more the situation we see in the books is reminiscent of how our school systems function after being subjected to variations on the above-mentioned policies. Albus might have been headmaster of Hogwarts, but I don't think was interested in the education of his students as most commenters here would understand it. Rather the opposite, in fact.

Getting back to Divination, Albus told Harry, alone, he was planning on dropping it until he saw Sybil prophecy, at which point he decided to hire her and retain the class. His goal in that conversation was to convince Harry that Trelawny's prophecies should be taken seriously - why, they even convinced the wise Dumbledore the subject should maintained after all! Saying that he had always believed in the power of true Divination, despite others' short-sighted skepticism, and that Sybil was proof he was right would have been equally effective with Harry. He also knows by that point that Harry doesn't repeat or think critically about their discussions later, so he wouldn't have worried about his general campaign against Divination being disrupted.

Besides, it's unlike Dumbles to offer an outright lie about something it should be possible to fact check, instead of misdirecting his audience toward the desired conclusion.

[sunnyskywalker]

Speaking of the governors vs. Dumbledore and the budget, I wonder if maybe the staffing issue is more a side effect than a goal? Dumbledore seems to have broad, near-total authority over who gets hired and fired. But does he control the purse strings and determine how many positions are available for hiring and firing? Probably not.

No doubt he would like to be. For the good of the school of course. Best to have someone who is actually "on the ground" and knows the issues have final say over the budget, he'd argue. While the governors would naturally disagree, and furthermore object strenuously to Hire X and want him/her gone now. Which Dumbledore ever so politely refuses to do. So the governors decline to post any new positions to try to force Dumbledore's hand, telling him if the new hires are so great they'll manage, and figuring that it'll be too hard to run things without more staff and Dumbledore will cave. Dumbledore retaliates by hiring gross incompetents, figuring once the governors' kids and grandkids are forced to be taught by these people, they'll cave to his demands and give him more control over how many positions are available, as a wedge into getting more control over the purse strings generally.

Or some other variety of a power squabble, if this doesn't quite work. (Never having had a good ringside view of one, I'd need more time to think and work out a really solid scenario.)

And if this happens to lead to the dumbing-down of the curriculum in the meantime, well, he can work with that. After all, it's his duty to ensure the children aren't learning any dangerous magic which might set them on the path to Dark Lord-dom. So cut alchemy as an elective, remove a few more books from the library, cut some of the more difficult and dangerous magic from the core classes... And hey, conveniently the teachers are also too busy to notice what he gets up to. Things are looking rosy after all!