[HPforGrownups] Re: Fiction and entertainment in the wizarding world
Jenett
gwynyth at drizzle.com
Sat Dec 8 16:56:27 UTC 2001
No: HPFGUIDX 31134
At 4:29 PM +0000 12/8/01, trucoolsg wrote:
>I agree, I like this about the books too. Also, to clear up an
>earlier point suggesting that life at British/European boarding
>school must be boring if it is without TV's and videos...this is not
>the case now, most boarding schools have a television in their common
>rooms, as far as I'm aware!!
Question is, though, how often that TV gets used.
I went to boarding school in the US for two years. We did, in fact,
have a TV in our common room (though we only had a VCR because I
lived nearby, and brought the old one I'd inherited from my parents
up with me. Otherwise we'd have had to depend on the niceness of our
house counsellors to let us use theirs, if we wanted to watch a video)
But even with it there it didn't get a whole lot of use. This was a
school where we had classes from 8 until around 3, sports or other
afternoon commitments (like community service) until 5, then dinner,
and then most people had 3-5 hours of homework every night. (And some
of us had music rehearsals on top of that)
It just didn't leave a whole lot of time for TV. The average person
in my dorm might have watched 2-3 hours in a week, barring a movie on
the weekend. No one watched shows 'regularly' - stuff kept coming up
which meant we couldn't guarantee being free to watch at the same
time every week, which for a lot of people reduces the "I have to
turn on the TV" desire.
And when the TV did go on the blink, as it did a couple of times, it
wasn't a big crisis in anyone's life - we all found other things to
do. (Hang out, play cards, work on a project, go to the library,
whatever)
If that wasn't a big deal for kids from families where many of them
had had TVs in their rooms by that point, I can't see it really being
a major issue at Hogwarts, especially when a fair portion of the
student population (the kids from wizarding families). There's lots
of other stuff you can do. TV was a nice luxury, but it didn't seem
essential to anyone's happiness, and no one had trouble finding other
stuff for fun.
It does sound like the amount of homework is relatively high for the
amount of free time - there are several mentions of
Hermione/Ron/Harry having something of a hard time finding sufficient
free time for their independent research.
-Jenett
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