Harry Potter Goes to School

I've looked back over all 28 episodes and found eight topics or themes that seemed important in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone—things that the text has to say to the field of education, and things that education has to say back to Hogwarts. This episode takes a look at the first four topics. Here are all eight: 1. Hogwarts is a parody of school 2. All the people at Hogwarts are full humans 3. Learning theory 4. Joanne's literary tricks 5. Moral concerns 6. Things about teaching methods 7. Hogwarts as a miniature society 8. Themes I think Joanne intended

For every time you use your power to bring joy, inspiration, humor, healing, and humanizing to your students, thank you. Thank you from me and from all the people who will be living in the world with the children your students are now and the grownups that your students will become.

After at least six months of believing that Severus Snape is trying to steal the Sorcerer's Stone for himself and then adjusting that to believe that he's trying to steal it for the Dark Lord, the puzzle pieces of Harry's belief system are dramatically rearranged. We are a lot like Harry. In real life, when we're confronted by evidence that we have been really wrong about something, it's really hard.

It looks like the only school subject that is useful in the through-the-trap-door adventure is Herbology. If the purpose of the Hogwarts series was to promote the value of academics as taught in schools, we may expect to see a little more of what the kids learn in their classes coming into play in this adventure.

Did you notice that for helping Hagrid in the middle of the night, Harry and Hermione's punishment is helping Hagrid in the middle of the night? Did you notice that Hagrid didn't even acknowledge that Harry and Hermione are there in detention for helping him when he got himself into a big mess? He just carries on, as if Harry and Hermione are just random students to him. What's with that?

Why did Minerva deduct only 20 house points for Draco's nighttime wanderings but 50 house points each for the three Gryffindors' nighttime wanderings? Maybe because Gryffindor is her house, and she is the kind of person to be harder on students of her own house than students of another house. Maybe she took off so many points because Harry is extra-valuable? Of all the kids in the whole school, let's not lose Harry Potter, so let's punish him extra to keep him safe!

Harry, Ron, and Hermione face down two crises in this chapter: Hagrid's illegal dragon and impending final exams. The chapter begins about ten weeks before the end of the school year, and Hermione begins a concentrated period of preparing for final exams. It's good to remember that Hogwarts is a parody of school, and the British exam system is a hard-to-miss target for parody. Well, so is the American exam system.

Teachers love it when students have an AHA! moment. There are plenty of AHAs in the Hogwarts series—for the characters and for the readers. The big AHAs come at the end of each book, and the biggest AHAs come at the end of the series. So far, our trio has AHAd that Fluffy is guarding something, probably the grubby little package from Gringotts. The name Nicolas Flamel is a loose end thrown out by Hagrid, and the kids have rightly figured from Hagrid's nervous responses that Nicolas Flamel is an important clue to their current mystery: What is Fluffy guarding?

How routinely did Albus Dumbledore wander the halls, the classrooms, the common rooms of Hogwarts--invisibly? Could Mrs. Norris see him? How is that different from the way we supervise students in school with cameras, data-gathering instructional apps, even just watching them in the classroom? For better or for worse--students are watched and supervised and even surveilled all the time they're in school, maybe not by anyone invisible--but we all accept that as normal.

Christmas dinner at Hogwarts is an abundance that draws a sharp contrast to the meagerness of Harry's life with the Dursleys. Glimpses of the professors in a relaxed, even tipsy state amuse and amaze. Hagrid and Professors Dumbledore, Flitwick, and McGonagall are all there, joking, laughing, drinking, and flirting. Snape, appropriately, seems to be absent. Harry's afternoon is filled with Christmas contentment: snowball fights, wizard chess, leftovers, and Weasley antics. So far, the best Christmas Harry can remember. And Christmas is about to get even better.

If this podcast series were called “Harry Potter Plays Sports” instead of “Harry Potter Goes to School,” I'd have a lot more to say about Quidditch. But I do have something to say about Harry's first impression of Marcus Flint, captain of Slytherin's Quidditch team.

For the most part, these are really small pieces of leftovers, smaller than what I call Bits & Bobs, so I'm calling this episode Chips & Snips. Bits & Bobs really is a British English idiom, but as far as I know, I have invented the idiom Chips & Snips. You're welcome. I also considered calling this episode The Speed Round. You'll see why.

So many bits and bobs are left over in these chapters, things I didn't talk about in previous episodes because there were other things to talk about. So I'll talk about them now, and see if I can exhaust the possibilities for education-relevant ideas here before I exhaust myself and you too, kind listener. Harry's broom, Neville's trauma, Snape's assessment plan, and Peeves's linguistic brain teaser are all here.

I used to think that Hermione's big change happened in the moment between her rescue from the troll and her lie to Professor McGonagall about why she, Harry, Ron, and a troll were in the girls' bathroom together. But now I think that Hermione's big change happened gradually over the two months she was at Hogwarts. Clever as she is, she must have noticed that her social approach wasn't working very well.

Maybe I didn't go to the right kind of school, or maybe I didn't run with the wrong kind of kids, but I never, never thought I was about to be expelled from school. I can't even remember thinking that anyone I knew was at risk of being expelled from school. Whether it be expulsion, detention, losing house points, or just getting caught breaking rules and whatever comes from that, Gryffindor first years seem to think about avoiding punishment a lot.

Harry's hidden talent is flying, and he, Draco, Minerva, and Oliver are about to discover it. Neville, Ron, and Pavarti Patil have a little bit of the spotlight in this chapter too, but their hidden talents or non-talents stay kind of hidden.

Welcome to Harry Potter Goes to School: Learning In and Out of Hogwarts, a podcast for students, teachers, professors, parents, and anyone else interested in what a Hogwarts education has to offer. Please join us in the Great Hall for a chapter-by-chapter analysis of the Harry Potter series and all things education. What would the first day of school be like without announcements? Now then, let's get right to it.

Since Harry is just entering Hogwarts, everything is new to him, and it's new to us too. And since Hogwarts is a school, there is a lot of school-relevant material in these chapters. This episode is dedicated to the odds and ends, bits and bobs of more and less school-relevant ideas, the items that don't fit into big themes but are interesting nevertheless.

Many teachers I know are especially keen to create an atmosphere that is welcoming, warm, and safe, especially on the first days of school. This is not the case at Hogwarts.

We have double fear in this chapter. First, in a magical-mystery-adventure-type book series, we anticipate a good amount of tension and fear—because we have experience reading or knowing about magical-mystery-adventure-type stories. Second, as Harry prepares for his first day of school at Hogwarts, we anticipate a good amount of tension and fear—because we have been to school.

So many new things happen to Harry in the next few chapters as he—and we—are introduced to Hogwarts and the magical world. This episode will survey a few of the magical and not magical new things that Harry experiences as he gets settled in his new school.

Number four Privet Drive is neat, orderly and well-scrubbed on the outside, dark and malevolent on the inside. In contrast, the magical world seems to hold many places, people, and items that are the opposite—shabby in appearance, splendid in essence. In this chapter, we begin to see this contrast.

After 10 years of DON'T ASK QUESTIONS—the first rule for a quiet life with the Dursleys—Harry explodes with questions as Hagrid escorts him to Diagon Alley to get his magical school supplies.

This is a big one. The key to the entire educational program of the entire Hogwarts saga is revealed in this chapter. Well, one of the keys—a big key. And it's announced by high school dropout, Rubeus Hagrid.

The wizarding world intrudes on the Dursley's comfortable emptiness with nothing-more-dangerous-looking than a letter in an envelope. The power of the written word is enough to drive the Dursleys onto a stormy island shack and Vernon to madness. The study in contrast between the wizarding world (the good part of it) and the Muggle world (the bad part of it) is painted in this chapter as the power of the written word (the letter) vs. the power of physical force (the knobbly stick).

Number four, Privet Drive appears to be an orderly, healthy, stable place to grow up, with its tidy garden and family photographs, but it holds a bad secret behind the front door. Vernon and Petunia think their worst secret is the existence of their magical relatives. This chapter tells a far worse secret that is all too real and all too frequent, even in the non-literary world: child abuse and neglect.

Joanne sets the stage for Harry's life by introducing us to three contrasting “families:” James and Lily Potter—who have been murdered, and their little son Harry—who survived; Vernon and Petunia Dursley and their little son Dudley, who are about to receive a very unpleasant surprise; and Albus Dumbledore and Minerva McGonagall, and their “little son” Rubeus Hagrid, through whose eyes we start to understand just how important the events of the previous day have been in the magical world.

Welcome to Harry Potter Goes to School: Learning In and Out of Hogwarts, a podcast for students, teachers, professors, parents, and anyone else interested in what a Hogwarts education has to offer. Please join us in the Great Hall for a chapter-by-chapter analysis of the Harry Potter series and all things education. What would the first day of school be like without announcements? Now then, let's get right to it.

I’ve looked back over all 28 episodes and found eight topics or themes that seemed important in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone—things that the text has to say to the field of education, and things that education has to say back to Hogwarts. This episode takes a look at the first four topics.

For every time you use your power to bring joy, inspiration, humor, healing, and humanizing to your students, thank you from me and from all the people who will be living in the world with the children they are now and the grownups that your students will become.

After at least six months of believing that Severus Snape is trying to steal the Sorcerer’s Stone for himself and then adjusting that to believe that he’s trying to steal it for the Dark Lord, the puzzle pieces of Harry’s belief system are dramatically rearranged. In real life, when we’re confronted by evidence that we have been really wrong about something, it’s really hard.

It looks like the only school subject that is useful in the through-the-trap-door adventure is Herbology. If the purpose of the Hogwarts series was to promote the value of academics as taught in schools, we may expect to see a little more of what the kids learn in their classes coming into play in this adventure.

Did you notice that for helping Hagrid in the middle of the night, Harry and Hermione’s punishment is helping Hagrid in the middle of the night? Did you notice that Hagrid didn’t even acknowledge that Harry and Hermione are there in detention for helping him when he got himself into a big mess? He just carries on, as if Harry and Hermione are just random students to him. What’s with that?

Why did Minerva deduct only 20 house points for Draco’s nighttime wanderings but 50 house points each for the three Gryffindors’ nighttime wanderings? Maybe because Gryffindor is her house, and she is the kind of person to be harder on students of her own house than students of another house. Maybe she took off so many points because Harry is extra-valuable? Of all the kids in the whole school, let’s not lose Harry Potter, so let’s punish him extra bad to keep him safe! Maybe because she assumed that Harry and Hermione instigated the whole thing on poor, gullible Draco.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione face down two crises in this chapter: Hagrid’s illegal dragon and impending final exams. The chapter begins about ten weeks before the end of the school year, and Hermione begins a concentrated period of preparing for final exams. It’s good to remember that Hogwarts is a parody of school, and the British exam system is a hard-to-miss target for parody. Well, so is the American exam system.

Among many other things, the Hogwarts series is a series of mystery books, so we expect a lot of AHAs when mysteries are solved. The big AHAs come at the end of each book, and the biggest AHAs come at the end of the series. So far, our trio has AHAd that Fluffy is guarding something, probably the grubby little package from Gringotts. The name Nicolas Flamel is a loose end thrown out by Hagrid, and the kids have rightly figured from Hagrid’s nervous responses that Nicolas Flamel is an important clue to their current mystery: What is Fluffy guarding?

How routinely did Albus Dumbledore wander the halls, the classrooms, the common rooms of Hogwarts—invisibly? Could Mrs. Norris see him? How is that different from the way we supervise students in school with cameras, data-gathering instructional apps, even just watching them in the classroom? For better or for worse—students are watched and supervised and even surveilled all-the-time when they’re in school, maybe not by anyone invisible—but we all accept that as normal.

Christmas dinner at Hogwarts is an abundance that draws a sharp contrast to the meagerness of Harry’s life with the Dursleys. Glimpses of the professors in a relaxed, even tipsy state amuse and amaze. Hagrid and Professors Dumbledore, Flitwick, and McGonagall are all there, joking, laughing, drinking, and flirting. Snape, appropriately, seems to be absent. Harry’s afternoon is filled with Christmas contentment: snowball fights, wizard chess, leftovers, and Weasley antics. So far, the best Christmas Harry can remember. And Christmas is about to get even better.

Harry thinks that this will be his best Christmas ever, and it turns out to be a true prediction. Harry received plenty of love and “Baby’s First Christmas” presents when he was almost four months old, but since then, it’s been old socks, broken toys, paper clips, and neglect. The pile of presents on Harry’s bed on Christmas morning (delivered by house elves, no doubt) tells him that, for the first time he can remember, he has friends and family that he can count on. Mrs. Weasley’s hand knitted sweater and large box of homemade fudge welcomes him as an adopted member of the Weasley family. A package of chocolate frogs from Hermione reminds him that he now has friends. A hand-carved wooden flute from Hagrid tells him that someone cares about him enough to spend time making him a gift. A fifty pence piece from the Dursleys reminds him that Hogwarts is definitely a better home than number 4 Privet Drive.

On the evening of the day that Harry oh-so-inconspicuously receives his Nimbus 2000, he gets his first lesson in Quidditch in a private coaching session with team captain Oliver Wood. We get our first lesson in Quidditch at the same time. Harry doesn’t seem to need any flying coaching, but he does need to learn the rules of the game. When I read that passage closely, I realize how important it is to visualize what Oliver says and what the narrator tells us.

For the most part these are really small pieces of leftovers, smaller than what I call Bits & Bobs, so I’m calling this episode Chips & Snips. Bits & Bobs is a British English idiom, but as far as I know, I have invented the idiom Chips & Snips. You’re welcome. I also considered calling this episode The Speed Round. You’ll see why.

So many bits and bobs are left over in these chapters, things I didn’t talk about in previous episodes because there were other things to talk about. So I’ll talk about them now, and see if I can exhaust the possibilities for education-relevant ideas here before I exhaust myself and you too, kind listener. Harry's broom, Neville's trauma, Snape's assessment plan, and Peeves's linguistic brain teaser are all here. 

I used to think that Hermione’s big change happened in the moment between her rescue from the troll and her lie to Professor McGonagall about why she, Harry, Ron, and a troll were in the girls’ bathroom together. But now I think that Hermione’s big change happened gradually over the two months she was at Hogwarts. Clever as she is, she must have noticed that her social approach wasn’t working very well.

Maybe I didn’t go to the right kind of school, or maybe I didn’t run with the wrong kind of kids, but I never, never thought I was about to be expelled from school. I can’t even remember thinking that anyone I knew was at risk of being expelled from school. Whether it be expulsion, detention, losing house points, or just getting caught breaking rules and whatever comes from that, Gryffindor first years seem to think about avoiding punishment a lot.

Harry’s hidden talent is flying, and he, Draco, Minerva, and Oliver are about to discover it. Neville, Ron, and Pavarti Patil have a little bit of the spotlight in this chapter too, but their hidden talents or non-talents stay kind of hidden.

Just like the Hogwarts recruiting brochure promises, Harry’s classes are all about magic, but they don’t have the same enchanting appeal as Harry’s trip to Diagon Alley. To modify Gildeory’s famous exclamation from Chamber of Secrets, Harry must think, “Amazing! This is just like…school!” Even though the curriculum is different from that of Stonewall High, the structure is the same—separate classes for separate subjects, scheduled out through the week, complete with lectures, notes, homework, and tests.

Since Harry is just entering Hogwarts, everything is new to him, and it’s new to us too. And since Hogwarts is a school, there is a lot of school-relevant material in these chapters. This episode is dedicated to the odds and ends of more and less school-relevant ideas, the items that don’t fit into big themes, like fear and sorting, but are interesting nevertheless.

Many teachers I know are especially keen to create an atmosphere that is welcoming, warm, and safe, especially on the first days of school. This is not the case at Hogwarts. 

We have double fear in this chapter. First, in a magical-mystery-adventure-type book series, we anticipate a good amount of tension and fear—because we have experience reading or knowing about magical-mystery-adventure-type stories. Second, as Harry prepares for his first day of school at Hogwarts, we anticipate a good amount of tension and fear—because we have been to school.

So many new things happen to Harry in the next few chapters as he—and we—are introduced to Hogwarts and the magical world. This episode will survey a few of the magical and not magical new things that Harry experiences as he takes his first trip to Hogwarts. 

Number four Privet Drive is neat, orderly and well-scrubbed on the outside, dark and malevolent on the inside. In contrast, the magical world seems to hold many places, people, and items that are the opposite—shabby in appearance, splendid in essence. In this chapter, we begin to see this contrast.