After perusing the Hogwarts schedules that the fans have put together/deemed appropriate to put on the wikis, I felt they didn't carry the gravitas necessary to really call themselves "schedules."
So I made one myself.
Using a trial version of the aSc Timetable software (which can be found here if you're so inclined), I began to work my way through the classes, searching the digital versions of the novels for class names, specific dates, and days of the week. I attempted to get most of them, but there are a few instances where I simply didn't add the canon descriptions, more for simplicities sake than any sense of completion. Honestly, there were more than a few instances where the schedule is notoriously vague, and there are only a handful of descriptive course orders beyond the first Monday of the term.
Once I had everything I felt I could extract from the novels, I placed it all in a rough list, by year and then by class.
Now I had to make a few decisions.
The first was to determine how many periods were actually in a day. Rowling never actually mentions how many, but we see instances of three (3) classes after lunch, and a pair of double classes before. This, paired with a few other examples of breaks, class lists, and whatnot, led me to establish a seven (7) period day. This works well with a small issue I discovered when first placing my schedules. Let me lay it out for you:
It's explicitly stated that History of Magic occurs three (3) times per week in the first book. This seems rather reasonable, so we can extend this through Year 5, which gives us a grand total of fifteen classes per week. This isn't too bad, until we look at some of the other courses. Potions is explicitly and often stated to be a Gryffindor/Slytherin affair for the Class of 1998, as is Care of Magical Creatures in Book 3, but the rest are written as if only a single House is in attendance for each class.
This doesn't work.
Specifically, if we look at History of Magic again, we note that the fifteen classes per week balloons to a full sixty classes for Years 1 through 5, which would require a massive twelve periods per day to fill, and we haven't even got to 6th or 7th year yet. We can make our lives a bit easier by assuming that courses are paired, like Potions or Herbology are, which both makes our lives (and our teachers' lives!) quite a bit easier. This leaves us with only thirty periods per week for an individual instructor, and with a seven period day, five periods remaining for the final two years. Add an additional two periods for both 6th and 7th years with the assumption that post O.W.L. courses are fully combined, and one more for a Teacher Planning Period, and you've got a full thirty-five for the week.
With that decided, I could move forward with the classes. I made the decision to apply the three-per-week rule to all but three of the core classes: History of Magic, Transfiguration, Charms, and Defense Against the Dark Arts. Astronomy stayed as a once-per-night course, and I simply assumed that 6th and 7th year Astronomy students either had class on the weekend, or there were combined year classes in the evenings; as long as the class didn't happen during the daytime, I didn't need to worry about it. Herbology, although technically taking up three class periods per week, appeared to work in a 'one single class, one double class' format. I kept this throughout the Year 5, and also applied that same reasoning to Potions. Both of these classes made sense as 'lab classes' like you'd find in University, so I kept that format for them both.
I should mention that Potions only gets one double-period for first year, which seems to be implied in Book 1; the First Years have a double Potions class on Friday, and Snape introduces himself as if they'd not had his class before, which only makes sense if there's only one Potions class per week: the double one.
This then deals with Year 1 through Year 5, with only the placement of the relative courses and any strange periods (double Charms in Year 5, for example) to add. I did my best to place the known classes when they should occur, before noticing another issue:
First Years had a bit of free time.
In fact, First Years had a ton of free time. With only seventeen periods filled over the course of the week there were large gaps in the First Year timeline. I couldn't fill it with five-a-week classes, simply because the Professors didn't have the time to teach it. Theoretically each Professor could have access and use of a Time-Turner, but Book 3 is fairly explicit in how precious those are, and Book 5 implies that they're tightly controlled, so that isn't a good solution. Technically I could force most of the classes (except Herbology and Potions) to be full school classes, but that flies in the face of Book 4, where the Gryffindors and Slytherins have Care of Magical Creatures when Hufflepuffs have Transfiguration.
Instead, I chose to run with the idea is already planted in Book 1: First Years have afternoons off.
This isn't unsupported, either. Hagrid mentions explicitly that Harry has Friday afternoon off, so it's not too much of a stretch to just extend the time off to every day of the week. This has the added bonus of making Flying an obvous afternoon-before-dinner class, since there's no class for First Years to interfere with anyway, and makes the gaps in the First Year schedule go almost completely away.
"What about the Second Years then?", I hear you ask. "They have the same classes as the First Years, are they also limited to just morning class?" Nope! Second Years get massive breaks throughout their schedule, which I feel is justified. How else could Hermione keep running off to research the Chamber of Secrets throughout the day? Or so many Second Years stumbling upon the Basilisk when Ginny also happened to be out of class? Frankly, with the scheduling problems resulting from simply not having enough teachers at the school, it's rather amazing that more people weren't petrified or killed that year.
Moving forward to Year 3, and the electives. Although I had a few options to decide from here, I looked at the issue logically to make my determination. First, students were required to take at least two, and no more than three, electives out of five total options: Arithmancy, Divination, Care of Magical Creatures, Muggle Studies, and Study of Ancient Runes. If we split each house among the five evenly and then separate into pairs as we did for the core classes, we're effectively looking at a half-size class compared the core ones. There's really no reason for such a small class size, so we can combine the classes to make the electives all-House courses, with the only exception being Care of Magical Creatures, which is explicitly mentioned as a split course.
As for scheduling, we have only a bit of information to go off of. Technically, Rowling has Divination occurring during both a Muggle Studies class and an Arithmancy class (and an Ancient Runes class!), but that seems, well, short-sighted. So I've ignored it. Instead, I've invented some lore, as follows:
One last thing then, in this massive brain-dump I call a blogpost: in Book 5, it's noted that Ginny, a Gryffindor, leaves Herbology with Luna, a Ravenclaw, even though Gryffindors are paired with Hufflepuffs in Harry's year. I've solved this by instituting a House-pairing cycle, which goes as follows:
So I made one myself.
Using a trial version of the aSc Timetable software (which can be found here if you're so inclined), I began to work my way through the classes, searching the digital versions of the novels for class names, specific dates, and days of the week. I attempted to get most of them, but there are a few instances where I simply didn't add the canon descriptions, more for simplicities sake than any sense of completion. Honestly, there were more than a few instances where the schedule is notoriously vague, and there are only a handful of descriptive course orders beyond the first Monday of the term.
Once I had everything I felt I could extract from the novels, I placed it all in a rough list, by year and then by class.
Now I had to make a few decisions.
The first was to determine how many periods were actually in a day. Rowling never actually mentions how many, but we see instances of three (3) classes after lunch, and a pair of double classes before. This, paired with a few other examples of breaks, class lists, and whatnot, led me to establish a seven (7) period day. This works well with a small issue I discovered when first placing my schedules. Let me lay it out for you:
It's explicitly stated that History of Magic occurs three (3) times per week in the first book. This seems rather reasonable, so we can extend this through Year 5, which gives us a grand total of fifteen classes per week. This isn't too bad, until we look at some of the other courses. Potions is explicitly and often stated to be a Gryffindor/Slytherin affair for the Class of 1998, as is Care of Magical Creatures in Book 3, but the rest are written as if only a single House is in attendance for each class.
This doesn't work.
Specifically, if we look at History of Magic again, we note that the fifteen classes per week balloons to a full sixty classes for Years 1 through 5, which would require a massive twelve periods per day to fill, and we haven't even got to 6th or 7th year yet. We can make our lives a bit easier by assuming that courses are paired, like Potions or Herbology are, which both makes our lives (and our teachers' lives!) quite a bit easier. This leaves us with only thirty periods per week for an individual instructor, and with a seven period day, five periods remaining for the final two years. Add an additional two periods for both 6th and 7th years with the assumption that post O.W.L. courses are fully combined, and one more for a Teacher Planning Period, and you've got a full thirty-five for the week.
With that decided, I could move forward with the classes. I made the decision to apply the three-per-week rule to all but three of the core classes: History of Magic, Transfiguration, Charms, and Defense Against the Dark Arts. Astronomy stayed as a once-per-night course, and I simply assumed that 6th and 7th year Astronomy students either had class on the weekend, or there were combined year classes in the evenings; as long as the class didn't happen during the daytime, I didn't need to worry about it. Herbology, although technically taking up three class periods per week, appeared to work in a 'one single class, one double class' format. I kept this throughout the Year 5, and also applied that same reasoning to Potions. Both of these classes made sense as 'lab classes' like you'd find in University, so I kept that format for them both.
I should mention that Potions only gets one double-period for first year, which seems to be implied in Book 1; the First Years have a double Potions class on Friday, and Snape introduces himself as if they'd not had his class before, which only makes sense if there's only one Potions class per week: the double one.
This then deals with Year 1 through Year 5, with only the placement of the relative courses and any strange periods (double Charms in Year 5, for example) to add. I did my best to place the known classes when they should occur, before noticing another issue:
First Years had a bit of free time.
In fact, First Years had a ton of free time. With only seventeen periods filled over the course of the week there were large gaps in the First Year timeline. I couldn't fill it with five-a-week classes, simply because the Professors didn't have the time to teach it. Theoretically each Professor could have access and use of a Time-Turner, but Book 3 is fairly explicit in how precious those are, and Book 5 implies that they're tightly controlled, so that isn't a good solution. Technically I could force most of the classes (except Herbology and Potions) to be full school classes, but that flies in the face of Book 4, where the Gryffindors and Slytherins have Care of Magical Creatures when Hufflepuffs have Transfiguration.
Instead, I chose to run with the idea is already planted in Book 1: First Years have afternoons off.
This isn't unsupported, either. Hagrid mentions explicitly that Harry has Friday afternoon off, so it's not too much of a stretch to just extend the time off to every day of the week. This has the added bonus of making Flying an obvous afternoon-before-dinner class, since there's no class for First Years to interfere with anyway, and makes the gaps in the First Year schedule go almost completely away.
"What about the Second Years then?", I hear you ask. "They have the same classes as the First Years, are they also limited to just morning class?" Nope! Second Years get massive breaks throughout their schedule, which I feel is justified. How else could Hermione keep running off to research the Chamber of Secrets throughout the day? Or so many Second Years stumbling upon the Basilisk when Ginny also happened to be out of class? Frankly, with the scheduling problems resulting from simply not having enough teachers at the school, it's rather amazing that more people weren't petrified or killed that year.
Moving forward to Year 3, and the electives. Although I had a few options to decide from here, I looked at the issue logically to make my determination. First, students were required to take at least two, and no more than three, electives out of five total options: Arithmancy, Divination, Care of Magical Creatures, Muggle Studies, and Study of Ancient Runes. If we split each house among the five evenly and then separate into pairs as we did for the core classes, we're effectively looking at a half-size class compared the core ones. There's really no reason for such a small class size, so we can combine the classes to make the electives all-House courses, with the only exception being Care of Magical Creatures, which is explicitly mentioned as a split course.
As for scheduling, we have only a bit of information to go off of. Technically, Rowling has Divination occurring during both a Muggle Studies class and an Arithmancy class (and an Ancient Runes class!), but that seems, well, short-sighted. So I've ignored it. Instead, I've invented some lore, as follows:
At Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the electives Muggle Studies and the Study of Ancient Runes always occur at the same time, as do the electives Arithmancy and Divination. It is a long-held belief among witches and wizards that no single individual can both understand the intricate difficulties of Ancient Runes while simultaneously comprehending the vast implausibility of Muggles, thus providing no impetuous to make both classes simultaneously available.
The split between Divination and Arithmancy is much easier to explain: Arithmancers and Diviners simply despise both their opposing disciplines, and each other.With this new non-canon lore, I can add the rest of the electives to the schedule and allow them to populate. That only leaves 6th and 7th years, which aren't too difficult to finish. Book 6 implies that Gryffindor shares Defense Against the Dark Arts with Hufflepuff, but with the limited number of classes available for 6th year (2), we're forced to assume that core classes must be shared between all four houses. This works in my favor though, since classes are only available to those who scored high enough on their O.W.L.s, and you're bound to have a few drop-outs along with the range of grades. This means smaller class sizes, so combining the classes into a single period makes sense from a logistical standpoint as well. I've also chosen to increase the elective courses to four-a-week; in my mind, these courses become more important in Years 6 and 7, since they begin to lead students toward their choice of career at this point in their schooling.
One last thing then, in this massive brain-dump I call a blogpost: in Book 5, it's noted that Ginny, a Gryffindor, leaves Herbology with Luna, a Ravenclaw, even though Gryffindors are paired with Hufflepuffs in Harry's year. I've solved this by instituting a House-pairing cycle, which goes as follows:
- Cycle A:
- Potions, Care of Magical Creatures, History of Magic: Gryffindor/Slytherin, Hufflepuff/Ravenclaw
- Transfiguration, Defense Against the Dark Arts: Gryffindor/Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff/Slytherin
- Charms, Herbology: Gryffindor/Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw/Slytherin
- Cycle B:
- Potions, Care of Magical Creatures, History of Magic: Gryffindor/Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw/Slytherin
- Transfiguration, Defense Against the Dark Arts: Gryffindor/Slytherin, Hufflepuff/Ravenclaw
- Charms, Herbology: Gryffindor/Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff/Slytherin
- Cycle C:
- Potions, Care of Magical Creatures, History of Magic: Gryffindor/Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff/Slytherin
- Transfiguration, Defense Against the Dark Arts: Gryffindor/Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw/Slytherin
- Charms, Herbology: Gryffindor/Slytherin, Hufflepuff/Ravenclaw
I think that covers everything. I should have the schedules up as separate posts in a couple of days, and, honestly, they should be up before this even gets linked over on my FFN profile, so hopefully there's no issue there. If there are any questions, you can either leave one below (I'll make sure to keep blog comments open), or you can shoot me a message either via e-mail or PM on FFN.
Oh! One more thing: this is free to use (as are most things done in an other-owned universe), I'd just appreciate an attribution if you do. That's all. Thanks, and enjoy!.
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