What's in the Box?

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 177024

Bart wrote:
> > First of all, while the canon is kind of self-contradictory on
this, there APPEAR to be about 10 students in each house in each class
(about 40 per year, about 280 students in the school).
> 
Random832 responded"
> Whoa, there. This is what happens when everyone's so obsessed with
the numbers - There are 10 students for each house in Harry's year
*that JKR has defined* - backgrounds, personalities, etc (even that
haven't appeared on her page, it's all presumably in her notes given
the list we've seen) - it's a sketch of the student body, a way for
her to model the reactions of the larger group. It's a microcosm.
> 
> Would we honestly expect her to come up with so much as names for
all of a larger student body? This assumption that because she's only
got 40 characters on the class list, that there's only 40 students in
harry's year, is unfair - it's as if saying "You didn't make a longer
list, so you're not _allowed_ to say that there's thousands of students"

Carol responds:
Actually, Bart is right. Although JKR has only "defined" eight of the
ten (two of the Gryffindor girls in Harry's year remain unnamed),
canon clearly indicates ten Gryffindors, ten Slytherins, and ten
Hufflepuffs in Harry's year until OoP, when there are suddenly about
thirty students in Harry's DADA class, which, nevertheless, still
appears to consist solely of Gryffindors. We can't be sure about the
Ravenclaws because Harry shares no classes with them, but the Sorting
Hat "quarters" the students every year, and there's no reason to
suppose that Ravenclaw would not have the same number of students as
all the others.

Here's the relevant canon (which has no doubt been presented at least
a dozen times before):

First flying lesson, Gryffindors and Slytherins together: "the
Slytherins were already there, and so were twenty broomsticks lying on
in neat lines on the ground" (SS Am. ed. 146). That's twenty
broomsticks (should it be "brooms"?) for twenty students, ten each
from Gryffindor and Slytherin.

Herbology, second year, Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs together: "About
twenty pairs of different colored earmuffs were lying on the bench"
(CoS Am. ed. 91). That would be ten for the Gryffindors, ten or
"about" ten for the Hufflepuffs, and one, the fluffy pink ones, for
Professor Sprout.

In PoA, we have the Boggart lesson (Gryffindors only), in which
everyone except Harry and Hermione gets to fight the Boggart, and
eight Boggarts, not counting Lupin's "orb" that he turns into a
cockroach, are specifically identified (PoA Am. ed. 135-39).

If we count the students named in the Sorting Hat ceremony, we get
three specifically named as Hufflepuffs, three as Ravenclaws, seven as
Gryffindors, five (counting Crabbe and Goyle) as Slytherins, and seven
not identified. Of the seven, we can place two in Slytherin, one in
Gryffindor, and one in Ravenclaw. That isn't all of the first-years,
of course, but it's most of them. There aren't many gaps in the
ceremony, and the groups of students called for their OWLs in OoP
contain no new names except Anthony Goldstein (whom we've already met
in the DA) and Daphne Greengrass (OoP Am ed. 121), which suggests to
me that JKR is filling in the gap between Justin Finch-Fletchley and
Hermione Granger and part of a larger gap between Hermione Granger and
Neville Longbottom in the Sorting ceremony. Harry's group includes
Pansy Parkinson and the Patil twins: Sally-Anne Perks (SS 713) gets
left out.

At any rate, I think it's clear that Harry's year contains either
exactly forty students or very close to that number. His father's
class must have been even smaller, with only four Gryffindor boys. JKR
tries to increase the number as of OoP, and somehow manages to have
more people attending one of the Quidditch matches (I forget which
book) and the Yule Ball than attend the whole school if the other
classes are the same size as Harry's, but 280 students (40 per year)
is not just an assumption. For Harry's year, at least, 40 students is
as close as we can get to canon.

Then again, JKR tells us that in SS/PS that three students are left to
be Sorted, and those "three" students turn out to be Dean Thomas, Lisa
Turpin, Ron Weasley, and Blaise Zabini (122), so we're presented quite
early on with evidence that JKR can't count the fingers on one hand.

Carol, noting that she also can't remember whether the sorting Stool
has three legs or four