User blog:Ckohrs0221/Class Revamp Explanation

Hello everyone!

I understand that the blog and decision to restructure classes came with a bit of haste, and perhaps some feelings of uncertainty and confusion. So I'd like to take this blog to address the thought process behind the decision, to hopefully alleviate some of the concerns and confusion.

It's not a secret that, long before our wiki activity started to dwindle, classes had been a struggle for both professors and students alike. The few students that would post were frustrated that professors weren't, and professors who were posting commented about how few students would participate, making the work they'd put into classes a waste of their time. This has been an issue for OOC years. Blogs have been written, teachers have come up with a variety of fun and interesting new ways to work their classes... but activity on class posting always seemed to peter out after Christmas, if not after week 2 or 3.

A long time ago, I was talking about this with Echo, who told me that back in the early, early days of the wiki, there weren't enough RPed students (because the userbase was still being built up) to RP 7 full years in each class. She thought it was so cool that our userbase had grown to where that was sustainable. She also told me that's why there were two pages for each class-- that there were only 2 sections of each subject.

I brought this up in a discussion last August with the AI crew and proposed that maybe going back to a modified version of that old system might help boost activity for classes. When during the first week of Hogwarts no teacher had posted (even myself) I decided to go to Brocky with the idea that had been presented to alter the structure. I hoped that it would boost activity for classes, since nothing had happened yet. To be honest, I hadn't even seen a first year RPed or created yet. Brocky agreed it was a good idea to try, and so we made the adjustments quickly, for the sake of getting classes started.

Let's look at the math a little.

Let's say that you RP 4 students regularly: a 1st year, 3rd year, 6th year and 7th year. For just the basic subjects (not including special subjects for your older years) that's 6 classes. Which means that for just the basic classes along (not even including flying for your 1st year) that you are trying to keep up with twenty-four different RPs. That's a lot. With the new sub-divisions, you're only trying to keep up with twelve. (Again, not counting special classes or flying.)

For teachers, rather than coming up with 3-7 different lesson plans (depending on how classes had been divided), you only have to come up with 1-3, drastically reducing the amount of work they have to do.

Moving on to the IC aspects.

I agree... the transition is clunky. We're aided by some canon stuff to lean on though, given the recent expansion. There was some evidence in the 7th books (even as far back to the beginning of the 5th book) that when things were getting questionable or even frightening in the world, that parents started to pull their students from Hogwarts. That's what we're going with here. Obviously there are many, many students at Hogwarts that never got names or faces we got to know, and yes that probably exists in our world as well... but no one RPs NPCs in classes. So what you're left with is only a few people per class, and that doesn't make a lot of sense. So we're going with that due to the drop of the student population, a change had to be made to fit the system.

I fully understand that this would be quite a jolt for teachers and students IC. Feel free to RP them as such! There's nothing that says your character has to just be okay with the decision that was made.

I agree that in a class with 11-13 year olds, there will be differing ability levels. And that that's probably hard to teach to. What I'd like to point out are some canon differences in materials that are taught. In the books things are taught differently from the movies which are taught differently (even more so) from the Harry Potter video games (which provided a wealth of various spells, many of which I know we teach). Feel free to just ballpark which spells make sense for your batch of students and go from there. Have older students act as mentors to younger students. I saw a great idea from Jay about teachers hosting year-level study halls so that each year can have more individualized instruction.

The divisions were made to keep a sense of the testing levels. We didn't want to group 1-4 and then 5-7, because that kind of just leaves out OWLs. So instead we grouped 1-3, 4-5 and 6-7 to keep a sense of OWLs and NEWTs.

Moving back to OOC comments for the conclusion of this blog.

One of the hardest things for any organization is to admit that their size is dwindling. It's so much easier to keep firing on all cylinders and try to keep up the same level of production from when you were at your biggest and most flourishing. But everything ebbs and flows. If you keep trying to maintain something for a large group of people, when there just isn't, that becomes really ineffective, really quickly.

The way we were handling classes wasn't effective for us anymore, and hadn't been for a long time.

This structure is going to be done on a trial-basis for this IC term. At the end of the term, we'll post a wiki-wide vote on whether we want to continue with this format, or switch back to our old method.

Feel free to leave comments in the comments section!

Love sought is good, but giv'n  unsought  is better.  23:21, November 10, 2019 (UTC)