[HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: British School System

[Terry James]

>From: "psychic_serpent" <psychic_serpent at yahoo.com>
>
>If most years in each Hogwarts house have 8-10 students, that's only
>about 32-40 per year.  --Barb
>

I've never really understood this assumption.  I always assumed that, for 
instance, there are several first-year Gryffindor Herbology classes, not 
just the one that we happen to see with Harry. Example:  If there are ten 
Gryffindor students in Harry's classes, and five first-year Herbology 
classes with Gryffs in them, then that would be fifty first-year Gryffs.  We 
don't hear about the other classes because Harry doesn't go to them, and 
it's mostly filtered through his POV.  We don't hear the other kids being 
Sorted because we only see what Harry was paying attention to.  We don't see 
the other first-year boys' bedrooms because Harry doesn't sleep there, 
doesn't go to classes with those boys, and never really has any interaction 
with them.

The (American? do they do this in England?) system of changing classes in 
middle and high school means that one teacher might teach six different sets 
of tenth-grade math, but it's all tenth-grade students.  Usually the 
students are well mixed--you go to seven classes a day, and they are each 
made up of different students--but in fifth grade where I went, to get us 
used to changing classes, they marched the whole class from one teacher to 
the next, but there were five different classes involved.  This seems to be 
what happens at Hogwarts--one group stays together all the time (except for 
the optional courses), but there is more than one group involved, and we 
just don't see the others.

Is there something in canon which contradicts this?

Terry LJ

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