A lot of people point out that it doesn’t make any sense that Harry and Ron didn’t like their schoolwork. Well I figured out why:
It’s because the magic system is just as boring in-universe as out of universe. It doesn’t make any sense in universe either. Harry and Ron realised Rowling’s magic system kinda stinks way before we did, because they spent all day learning it.
If Sanderson had been writing Harry Potter, then Harry and Ron would have liked learning magic as much as Hermione did (Also, Sanderson actually DID write a book about a super-school, it’s called Skyward, it’s good)
Well, the needs of a fiction reader and the needs of a character in the world are different. Harry actually needed to learn magic. And there’s no logic to it, so all he could do was rote memorisation. He would have been happier with a magic system that makes sense.
Hermione is supposed to be a genius nerd, and yet she does far less in 7 books to actually study her magic system, than Vin has done by the start of the second book. Vin isn’t a nerd or a genius, she’s just a capable hero living in a world where magic makes sense, so she’s better at studying than Hermione. Hermione gets 8 hours to do it a day for 6 years and still can’t compete with Vin.
What is this post even? One of the main plot points of one of the books was about how the students are so engaged that they made an underground secret class to study and learn.
Harry literally stays up all night studying his books during summer break in the earlier years, the book describes how it’s all he can think about. (before schooling became a lower priority due to the active war).
There are always going to be boring classes, and the book describes that even Hermione is bored in some of them, but typically the students are always engaged, it’s clear that Hermione is a hard worker with doctor parents that expect a lot from her, not that she is some hyper genius.
Harry is a rich jock and a literal child, he is the common trope of the school athlete that slacks in classes occasionally and likes trouble making.
I think it’s very clear that the students were generally engaged in engaging classes with good teachers (hagrids classes, PE / flying, defense against the dark arts, the gardening class with the screaming plants), disengaged in classes that would have equivalent perceptions of boringness (history of magic).