There should be more teachers too. And probably less of them should be named characters, do we really need to know who teaches herbology?
If you want to have interesting scenes in Herbology class, you kind of do. And to be fair, there's potential for interesting scenes in Herbology class.
Though that would throw a wrench in the DADA plot point, I suppose.
I guess I'm biased because I went to a large high school, a school with only a few hundred students total (across seven years) and only one teacher per subject reads as fake to me even though I'm sure it's true somewhere.
It's vaguely tenable for a
really small community but it's also very very bad practice as an educational institution.
Like, Severus Snape is a horrible teacher on numerous levels; his only real contribution to his classes is realistically "make sure the students mostly don't blow themselves up worse than Madame Pomfrey can fix," which is admittedly an important part of his job but very far from the
only part of his job. About the only good piece of educational practice I can find in him is his tendency to move around the classroom, which would matter more if he knew how to teach his way out of a paper bag
while moving around the classroom.
Obviously the reasons Snape has that job are far more complicated than can be easily summarized by looking at the merits of "Severus Snape teaching Potions class" in and of themselves. There's a lot of political shit involved and so on, I know.
But still,
Snape is a horrible teacher, and the damage he does is greatly worsened by the fact that he's
everyone's teacher. In a core subject that is mandatory for at least five years if not seven. So no matter how abusive he is, there is no way to ever avoid him, to transfer out of his classes, or for the school to just sideline him as an "instructional coach" or something and get him the fuck out of the classroom.
(I would
think that as an ancient school, Hogwarts would have enough of an endowment to provide a sinecure salary for a few 'professors' who actually teach zero or very few classes. This would have been
far better for everyone involved as a solution for "what does Dumbledore do with Snape" than having Snape
actually teach literally every kid at Hogwarts)
Hogwarts classes appear to be maybe 2 hours long... as little as once week. And each class is teaching half the grade level. so 2 classes per grade level x 7 level = 14 classes. That comes out to the teacher teaching as little as 3 times per day if we don't count electives.
I mean probably important classes like Charms are more than 1/week, but it's not totally out there. This isn't a US school where you have math class every school day.
Yeah, but if you're covering 28 hours of actual time spent in front of students per week, there's a corresponding overburden of grading and prep time. The Charms teacher spends a lot of time setting up lab activities and scoring papers, even if Professor Flitwick is only actually spending 28 hours a week in front of students- and it can get significantly worse if he's spending more than that.
...
Though the complexity of the extra work is reduced by a few factors.
Such as Hogwarts being ableist-as-fuck and not even pretending to have special accommodations or differentiated instruction.
Or such as Hogwarts bypassing a lot of disciplinary paperwork requirements in favor of an arbitrary points system, and more or less eliminating any idea that teachers directly contact parents regarding the students' academic progress.
And the curriculum being endlessly recyclable... Well, scratch that. It
does actually change now that I think about it, the Ministry of Magic issues new curriculum on a regular basis, which is
bizarre if Hogwarts is the only school in the country because then there really shouldn't be a government school board, only the Hogwarts board of directors.
