Hogwarts Schedules
Can’t sleep because hooray, insomnia rearing its head the night before a planned all-nighter! Ugh.
So I’ve now tentatively plotted out the first three years of scheduling at Hogwarts. First year is pretty straightforward, really (this almost entirely matches what’s mentioned in canon):
I’ve obviously made some assumptions along the way and a whole fuckton of arbitrary decisions, since we only see Slytherin and Hufflepuff’s timetables when they interact with Gryffindor (and therefore don’t see Ravenclaw’s at ALL).
And then second year, which nearly killed me because I could not fucking figure it out (there are some more deviations from noted canon here, in an effort to actually make it possible):
There’s an extra period there because a] I figured that upper-year students would probably need more periods to get enough education in everything they’re taking, and b] in the first book, when McGonagall catches Harry flying, she goes into a Charms classroom to fetch Oliver Wood. I’m thinking the periods are 9-10, 10:15-11:15, lunch 11:15-12:15, 12:15-1:15, 1:30-2:30, 2:45-3:45 — that gives them time to navigate the castle and means that when McGonagall went to fetch Oliver, he was probably just packing up, or Flitwick (I think it was a Charms class?) was keeping them late, which makes sense since he was in his fifth year and was preparing for OWLs.
BUT YEAH. All of the house schedules, taken from these charts are going to be going up on Pottermorphs, all prettified by jteeple (the first two years’ schedules are already up, in fact).
This is way more fun than it probably looks, I swear. It’s like a giant multi-faceted logic puzzle - every House has to have the same number of each class, some classes are together, some classes are double-length, and you can’t have the same class twice in one day unless it’s a double class and two houses can’t have the same class at the same time unless it’s together (obviously). As far as I can tell from canon, the only classes that houses had together were potions and herbology - everything else seems to just be single houses until their NEWT levels.
Third year I’m going to refrain from posting even though that’s what I did tonight. (Also while this is definitely not why I’m behind on my NaNo, it certainly hasn’t helped, whoops.)
I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how the fuck the professors teach so many damned classes at the same time, since unless Harry’s cohort is extremely lucky and got the best professors including all four Heads, there isn’t a fleet of unknown staff members (and, I mean, they refer to “the Defence Against the Dark Arts” teacher a few times). So far I can think of three possibilities:
1) They just use a time-turner and seven different classrooms (one for each year, which is somehow Hogwarts’ best-kept secret). The classrooms are probably bewitched to appear empty to anyone not in that year.
2) The door to the Charms room, for example, is bewitched, and actually opens into seven identical classrooms, and opens into whichever one of those classrooms you currently need to be in. The teachers end up needing to be in multiple classrooms at once to teach different years, and so they end up being simultaneously in five or six (or whatever) classrooms. (Care of Magical Creatures and Astronomy, however? No fucking clue.)
3) Some combination of the two? Because at some point you’d run into someone going into the same door as you and that would be weird, as well.
Really it’s just “Rowling didn’t really think this through”, but. We’re ignoring that.
SO YEAH HERE HAVE MY LATE-NIGHT HARRY POTTER RAMBLE ABOUT SCHEDULING. If anyone has any suggestions/comments/questions, lemme know! I’ve obviously put a fair amount of thought + effort into this, but I’m also only one person, so.
