Bringing Potter's lessons to campus - Out of the Blue

By mid-November, the
campus traditions
marking the beginning
of the holiday season be-
gan: exhausted students were looking forward to going home for Thanksgiving, but at the same time dreading it because of all the exams and papers that had to be finished first.

Many professors were stubbornly pretending that the holiday didn't exist and refused to make life easier for travelers by canceling class on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving day.

Students joined in the holiday fun by studying frantically until the last possible moment, rushing through exams, e-mailing papers moments before the deadline and then leaving anyway.

But thankfully, something very untraditional happened this Thanksgiving season. In the middle of one of the most unnecessarily stressful weeks of the year, the library suddenly emptied. Exhaustion was replaced by excitement and caffeine pills and Red Bull were replaced by popcorn and soda.

I had no idea what was going on until I heard one of my roommates ordering my other roommate back into her room to change into something that was more "Harry Potterish."

Somehow, I managed to tear myself away from my Middle East Politics paper to discover the two of them uncontrollably hyper and wearing head-to-toe gold and burgundy.

The new Harry Potter movie was opening at midnight, and they had picked up tickets a week in advance.

The next day, everyone was still uncontrollably hyper about Harry Potter. If they hadn't seen it the night before, they were seeing it that night. Some were rereading their books, just to "freshen up."

When I finally caught the bus to Towson that Friday, it was full of gold and burgundy-clad Hopkins kids who could be described as, believe it or not, downright rowdy.

And I was absolutely one of them -- at one point during the movie, the seven-year-old sitting in the seat in front of me had to ask me to be quiet. It was humbling and a little idiotic.

It was definitely not a typical Hopkins situation -- hundreds of Hopkins students wearing gold and burgundy on a pilgrimage to Towson, just to cheer for hormonal wizards and witches.

But as long as Harry Potter won the Triwizard Tournament, I don't think anyone cared.

Exams, papers and feeling idiotic could all go to hell for a few hours.

Cheering and wearing school colors -- it was almost like school spirit.

Well, maybe it was. Just Hogwarts school spirit, not Hopkins.

And why not? Hopkins and Hogwarts aren't so different.

We all waited for magical letters to tell us we'd been accepted, our professors sometimes seem evil and many times I've wondered if that little shack on the Freshman Quad was once the home of a giant groundskeeper named Hagrid.

Hogwarts has quidditch, Hopkins has lacrosse -- both of those involve flying around with sticks and beating people while chasing a tiny ball.

It seems like we have more school spirit for a mythical school of witchcraft and wizardry than we do for our own surreally nerdy school. I asked one of my roommates.

"Yeah, that's probably true," she said. "I mean, I've been to maybe one Hopkins sporting event ever -- and Harry Potter was definitely the highlight of my week."

I can admit that there is a lot of Hopkins that is decidedly un-Hogwartslike.

President Brody may be one of the most powerful men in the country and a national security advisor to President Bush, but he's no Albus Dumbledore.

He never welcomes us back to school with a giant feast in the Great Hall.

He could do something to the library to make it look less like a prison the same way Professor Dumbledore bewitched the Hogwarts ceiling to look like a starry night, but he doesn't.

And I guess the different houses of the AMRs are sort of like the different houses at Hogwarts.

Everybody lives together and feels a sense of community -- but after freshman year, we all live on different corners of Charles Village and our sense of community is based on surviving our classes together.

Hopkins, I think, could learn a lot from Hogwarts. We could have something like the House Cup. We're already practically divided into houses: Gilman, Bloomberg, Hodson and O'Connor -- almost like huge co-ed fraternities of arts and crafts, engineers, pre-meds and athletes.

We could cultivate a sense of friendly competition that's not based on a standard deviation or a curve -- and build something into our school's culture that's purely for fun.

Maybe I'm being a little harsh. We do get a whole day off for fall "break;" there's Intersession, and spring fair, and on-line registration.

Even though President Brody hasn't made the ceiling of D-Level look like a starry night, the lightpoles in the quads were decorated with holiday lights this year -- and that's a start.

But in the meantime, at least there are still three more Harry Potter movies. We can all give thanks for that.