Harry Potter: Becoming a Top Student from Scratch

Once the new students had become gradually familiar with the ever-shifting staircases of the castle, Wade also began to settle into a routine at Hogwarts.

First-year schedules were extremely light — on some days, there was only a single class, and never more than three. The rest of the time was for students to use freely. When Wade first saw the timetable, he was deeply skeptical — how could there be students constantly complaining about having too much homework, yet fail to turn in a mere few inches of parchment on time?

Back in his previous life, Wade had to write at least 300 characters for a composition before he even turned ten — and that was in Chinese, a language often called a "compressed package" for meaning. If he translated that into English, he could easily stretch it to 1,000 words. And after the intensive training of high school, university, and graduate school, writing 10,000 words in two days wasn't beyond his capabilities.

It wasn't until he had spent some time studying with Michael, Hermione, and the others that Wade finally understood the reason.

Among the first-year students, aside from Wade, Hermione found writing assignments the easiest — at the very least, she didn't make grammatical mistakes in basic sentence structure, rarely misspelled words, and could efficiently extract key points from the textbook and restate them with clear logic.

The others struggled to meet even these basic standards — even Michael from Ravenclaw.

Because they all came from wizarding families.

Wizards lived lives that were almost entirely isolated from Muggles — even if one of the parents was Muggle-born. Most wizarding families lived in seclusion, deliberately avoiding any contact with Muggles. They would even set up Muggle-Repelling Charms around their homes to keep Muggles from accidentally wandering in. As a result, wizards had no understanding of Muggle clothing, technology, or customs, and they certainly wouldn't send their children to Muggle schools. To them, it would be like entrusting your child to be educated by monkeys in trees.

Britain had only one wizarding school — Hogwarts. There was no such thing as a "wizarding elementary school" or "wizarding university." Within the wizarding world, children under the age of eleven were educated at home — if their parents had time, they might teach reading, writing, and basic arithmetic. If not, the child might not even know how to spell "quill."

Michael and the others had generally started receiving some form of education from their parents around the age of five or six, so they weren't completely illiterate. But the ability to read and write wasn't the same as having the ability to learn. Compared to Muggle schools' structured education systems, wizarding home education lacked many critical components. For example, wizarding parents typically didn't teach skills like logical reasoning or summarizing — Wade suspected that many wizards didn't even grasp those concepts themselves, given their disdain for Muggle theories.

Even Hermione and the other young wizards largely lacked the ability to quickly extract key ideas from a text and understand it. For example, their comprehension level might be limited to understanding: "Object A and B have the same temperature, and B and C have the same temperature, so A and C must be the same temperature." But their textbooks used phrasing like:

"If two thermodynamic systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then they must be in thermal equilibrium with each other. That is: If it can be confirmed that the physical properties of two systems do not change when allowed to exchange heat, then even without permitting heat exchange, it can be confirmed they are in equilibrium."

The young wizards: …?

Those strings of words flowed straight through their brains without leaving a trace.

Hermione could rely on her powerful memory to memorize everything, then slowly make sense of it by cross-referencing with other materials. But most of the young wizards could only copy down notes they didn't truly understand, then scratch their heads and turn in barely-passable homework, hoping the professor would be lenient enough to give them an "A" (Acceptable).

What's more, eleven-year-olds living away from home in a boarding school environment were barely supervised — even the notoriously strict Professors McGonagall and Snape wouldn't monitor what students did during free periods. Whether a student chose to nap in the dorm or play games in the common room was entirely up to them. Such a relaxed environment posed a huge test of self-discipline for underage students. Laziness and play are natural instincts; studying is not. For most, studying is not fun — it's a chore.

Well, except for people like Hermione.

And Wade.

In just half a month, the two had already stood out among the first-years. The difference between them was this: Hermione held herself to very high standards and expected the same from others. She firmly refused to let anyone copy her homework or break school rules. Wade, on the other hand, never minded if others copied his work. When he was buried in a practice room studying spells, he never forced anyone to keep up with him.

Wade deeply understood how lazy kids could be when it came to studying — he had been the same in his previous life. Now, he worked harder than anyone else, not because he loved studying, but because he loved magic. To him, magic was not something taken for granted or inherited — it was a rare and precious gift. That's why he cherished this opportunity more than anyone else at the school.

After practicing once again until nearly curfew, Wade hurried back to the Ravenclaw Tower. By then, the corridors were completely silent, as though everyone had gone to sleep. But the moment he entered the common room, he felt it was still early.

Hogwarts had a curfew but no official lights-out time — students were free to stay up all night in the brightly lit common room if they wished. The Ravenclaw common room was bustling with students of all years. Couples were whispering sweet nothings on sofas in the corners, younger students were playing wizard chess at the round tea tables, and upper-year students were writing furiously to finish assignments.

Despite the crowd, the atmosphere wasn't noisy — Ravenclaws instinctively kept their voices down when talking.

Seven or eight students were gathered around the fireplace, with occasional bursts of laughter from the girls. Wade glanced over, uninterested, and picked a quiet corner to sit and read while jotting down notes.

Michael noticed him and, after saying a few words to the girl next to him, strolled over with a smile and sat down beside Wade.

"Studying this late again?" Michael leaned on the table. "Wade, we've been here less than a month, and you've nearly finished the entire first-year curriculum. What are you going to do with the rest of the time? Don't take this the wrong way, but you're trying too hard. You should relax a little sometimes. Mate, do you have any idea how many girls want to get to know you?"

He tilted his head toward the fireplace, prompting another wave of giggles from the girls.

Wade paused, setting down his quill. His gray eyes calmly met Michael's as he asked:

"I don't know. But Michael — do you know how long we actually get to stay at Hogwarts?"

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