The World's Largest Gryffindor Reunion

Examiner column for June 9.

     Last week, J.K. Rowling startled many, including her audience, by delivering the commencement address at Harvard University. I had an invitation to that momentous event, but I chose instead to grade Advanced Placement exams in English Literature.

    I did this with some regret. As I watched Rowling’s address on YouTube, I stopped kicking myself long enough to realize that her words were relevant to what I was doing instead. Her humorous opening spoke of her nerves: “Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red [Harvard] banners, and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.”

It struck me that I, and not she, was at “the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.” In the English literature AP reading alone, there are 1100 teachers who gather yearly in one enormous room to spend a week helping College Board award college credit to high school writers.

    Our three cafeteria meals a day are not as atmospheric as those in the dining hall at Hogwarts, but between meals we grade students’ AP tests. Similar rituals play out in other venues for every single Advanced Placement test offered in high schools.

    In Rowling’s novels, Hogwarts teachers are devoted to their students and to teaching. It is a wonderful school of magic precisely because those teachers would have chosen to spend a week serving their students rather than traveling to hear a famous author!

    None of that was any consolation, however, on the day I missed Rowling’s speech. I was reading student essays while my husband was chuckling at Rowling’s words about her parents, who “thought my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage.”

    Yet Rowling’s witty words about her struggle as a writer applied directly to what I was doing that day. This huge gathering of AP teachers has a single purpose: to “reward students for what they do well” in their writing.

    Writing did not initially hold reward for Rowling. She lived years with little money, and many failures. All that fueled her imaginative gifts, she explained in her speech, yet I know she would have given anything to have been recognized as someone whose writing was more than a personal quirk.

    The AP teachers who have temporarily given up their families, jobs, and even an opportunity to hear J.K. Rowling, hope that our work liberates some students to pursue their talents. Good AP test grades can put good students in the perfect class that will change their lives forever—one tailored to their passion rather than a university requirement.

     So with each exam, I imagine a new J.K Rowling—someone for whom college credit will make the difference between being able to pursue a dream rather than a vocation, someone who might now take a risk in course selection.

    What is this AP reunion for, if not to encourage future “Gryffindor” graduates to release the magic that resides within themselves? There are no Harry Potters behind the words in the test booklets I grade, but there are many future authors, and encouraging the next J.K Rowling makes not hearing the current one a sacrifice worth making.

Comments

[David M]

Erica,
Thanks for putting what we are doing here in such a good light--I like the idea of liberating some students to go on and do the work that they were meant to do. Teaching is always--on some level--about saying good-bye to the best and brightest. The best teachers--even those at Hogwarts--make themselves obsolete. . .

[Erica]

But with blogs and comments, we never quite say good-bye!