Combining Students (Was Re: School year system in UK/Gluttony)

[DANCERWH86 at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 128817

Gerry wrote:
 
<<<<<Thanks, so Hogwarts is just different from what you are used to. What
you describe seems very strange to me. Especially the discouraging
part, what Hogwarts does I consider perfectly normal. In your original
post I got the impression your school had actually reasons for doing
so (though I cannot imagine what those could be. What you describe now
seems to me just a (weird) custom. Do I see this correctly? >>>>
 
 Speaking from personal experience I can understand the discouraging part especially in the US (since I've never been to a UK school and wouldn't want to speculate). Public and private schools are so different from one another in the US and it seems to me that the public ones are far more discouraging from student interaction within grades. I went to public elementary and middle school (Kindergarden-8th grade...So from ages 5 to 13 give or take). In middle school there was quite a bit of gang activity and at the high school it was just as bad if not worse. As a result the adminstration and on campus cops cracked down (I don't even know if the UK has school security like that). Lunches were much more seperated by grades and the inter grade classes were eliminated. I went to a private school for high school (for this reason...my parents didn't like the idea of the gang problems and their baby in the same school ;) ). There it was just the opposite. We were encouraged to talk to one another. Seniors who had graduated came back to talk about there colleges and we were all freshman to senior encouraged to talk to them. In my senior year I took a class with a lot of sophomores and also a friend took a class that was basically teaching Freshman with another teacher. We had breaks and studies and lunches together (late lunches usually went to juniors and seniors because seniors mostly had last period studies and got to leave so they could leave at lunch instead of hanging around). There was never a concious thought to seperating the groups. I would imagine that Hogwarts being a private institution albeit in the UK it would be quite different than a large public school. Also, the fact that its a boarding school it may be a better idea to encourage interaction in an attempt to rid anamosity from groups. Plus, I know when I was 11 I was intimidated by older kids and stuck with my own friends so the interaction may not be that great. A 17 year old probably isn't spending a lot of time with the 11 year old acquaintance. Just talking from personal experience and conjecture though.
 
Lindsay


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