UK School holidays

[GulPlum]

I'm keeping this post here rather than sending it straight to the 
OT-Chatter list because hopefully it will close this subject and secondly, 
with the change of topic, it becomes (very!) peripherally related to the HP 
stars' possible plans. :-)

(besides, this list is fairly quiet right now, so we're hardly drowning 
valid posts in a sea of off-topic slime!)

ovc88guelph wrote:

>I'm avoiding the HPFGU until after June 21!

How strange.:-)  What are you "hiding" from? Nothing is being said and no 
subjects are being covered that hasn't been said or covered before... 
Unless and until some new JKR tidbits come up (such as an interview) 
nothing's going to change. And it seems that JKR's not particularly keen to 
get on the publicity bandwagon just yet anyway.

<big snip>


>Could someone help me with the terms and holidays in UK school system? I'm 
>always perplexed by when breaks and exams occur. In particular, it seems 
>odd that classes continue after final exams!

I started typing up a load of stuff, but I decided that a concrete example 
is probably easiest to understand. So here's how this year and next shapes 
up dates-wise here in Birmingham (the Birmingham web sites are some of the 
best for any local authority in Britain):

http://www.bgfl.org/services/schools/termdate.htm

*BTW a "Community" school is what, AFAIK, you call "public" schools in 
North America)

As for exams, once they're over, so is the school year for the kids 
concerned. However, this is not necessarily the case for all schools. At my 
school, exams usually ended about a week before the school year, and that 
week was spent going over exam papers and trying to learn from mistakes.

The rest of this stuff is technically OT for this list and should be 
transferred to the main list if anyone wants to comment.

As far as Hogwarts is concerned, canon is unclear, but it seems like the 
kids laze around a lot once the exams are over and don't actually have classes.

>I also have the impression that the HHR were in school until July.

The best-guess calendar one can extrapolate indicates that the school year 
ends around in the last week of June/first week of July. The best 
indication we have is in GoF. We know that the Third Task took place on 
24th June, and the text refers to the last day of school being two weeks 
later.

>MMCK. who would ask Brits and Euros to refrain from calling all of us 
>across the water "Americans". That would be like calling Seamus "English"!

Sorry, but I don't get the logic. "America" is not a country, it's a 
continent. The fact that residents of the USA haven't invented a name for 
themselves in their 200 year history is their problem. What I mean is that 
the confusion is in calling residents of the USA "Americans", not in 
calling Canadians or Mexicans "Americans".

Personally, I get around the problem by calling all residents of the USA 
"Yanks". :-)

(On what is actually meant as a serious note: I've seen that on formal US 
occasions, the President of the USA is formally intoned as "The President 
of the United States". I really would like it if they actually called their 
country by its name: It is not called "The United States". It is called 
"The United States of America". This laissez-faire attitude really, really 
pisses me off!)