Long Post: Hogwarts School Day Schedule
Ok I’m trying to write a HPHM thingie (my MCs’ version of the Patronus SQ), and I’m a little confused about the Hogwarts schedule. Explanation below the cut.
According to the Harry Potter Lexicon:
“The day begins with breakfast in the Great Hall. During breakfast, the morning mail arrives in a flurry of hundreds of owls. A bell signals the start of the first class at 9 am.There are two morning classes with a break between (signaled by a bell), followed by lunch and a break.After lunch, classes resume at 1 pm. It is not clear if there are one or two classes in the afternoon.Supper is served in the Great Hall toward evening, after which the students are expected to be in their House common rooms for studying and socializing. Curfew for older students is 9 pm (OP).There is no set bedtime after supper.“
I know there would need to be 5 minute slots between lessons/breaks to allow students to get to where they need to be, but I’m trying to keep this somewhat simple, so I’m not including that.
We can assume breakfast is 8am to 9am, so I’ll assume all meals are an hour long as it doesn’t make much sense for them to be longer/shorter. Between 9am and 1pm leaves 4 hours for lunch, break and 2 classes; if lunch is 1 hour long, break and the 2 classes are 3 hours long together. I can’t imagine that a break being longer than 30 minutes, but that leaves 1hr15mins per class. For the students’ sake, I’d place the 30min break between the 2 classes, and this leaves lunch to start at 12pm and end at 1pm.
After lunch, let’s assume the same schedule of 2 x1hr15min classes and 30min break (seeing as it’s unclear if there are 1 or 2 afternoon classes)- this means the day would end at 4pm. Now: most UK school days start around 8:30am-9am, and end between 3pm-4pm (mine starts at 9am and ends at 3:35pm) so this school day isn’t unreasonable, however if lunch was 4hrs after breakfast, the dinner should be 4hrs after lunch, and therefore would start at 4pm and end at 5pm. Here’s a timetable to sum things up:
The time gap between the end of dinner and curfew (5pm to 9pm) is another 4 hours, so now I’m concerned: what happens if some of the students get hungry right before curfew? Is that ok or not?
Not to mention, having only 4 different classes a day seems a little...inefficient. Assuming that students don’t have classes on weekends, this means they have 20 periods (25 hours) a week, with 7 subjects to take in First Year, and at least 8 subjects in the years above (Flying is dropped in 2nd year, and at least 2 electives are taken up). This means that in first year, all subjects get 3 lessons (3hrs45mins) weekly save for one subject, which gets 2 lessons (2hrs30mins). In second year, 4 subjects get 3 lessons and the other 4 get 2 lessons. I feel like students would get a ton of homework to make up for this, on top of the long lessons where it’s difficult to concentrate.
I dunno, this schedule seems weird to me, so I made my version of it, with 3x30min lessons between break/lunch/dinner. I wasn’t sure if I should make the break 20 or 30 mins, but I went with 20 since 30 seemed excessive. As for dinner, it is recommended to eat at least 3 hours before going to bed, so I put dinner time at 6pm, assuming most students would eat sooner rather than later. I based this off of my own school timetable in an attempt to balance it a bit more, so it’s not an extreme range like the ‘3hrs45mins OR 2hrs30mins’, and having shorter periods means students don’t have to suffer in one subject for too long unless there’s a double.
According to my calculations and a few tables I drew, this gives 45 periods per week (22hrs30mins):
-7 periods (3hrs30mins) for 3 subjects and 6 periods (3hrs) for the other 4 in First Year
-6 periods (3 hrs) for 5 subjects and 5 periods (2hrs30mins) for the other 3 in Second Year
