Harry Potter Lessons Learned, Chapter 10: Halloween

Every time I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, there are certain lines that i look forward to finding again. Ron's "Are you a witch or not?" is at the top of the list. Dumbledore telling Harry not to "dwell on dreams and forget to live" in front of the Mirror of Erised is another. But the first is the ending of Chapter 10, "Halloween." Here we go:

"There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them."

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Let's get into the rest of the chapter and discuss what we can learn.

"But from that moment on"

This chapter has some fun firsts. As a baseball fan, I enjoy getting to see Harry at his first Quidditch lesson and I committed to memory the rules, the names of the balls, and the positions of each team.

I'm also in love with the students first real challenge in Charms. You can lecture me for hours about how to do something, but I don't truly learn something until I put it into practice and that is a huge part of this chapter.

But not for Hermione. We know from her first scene that she has done some practice spells, but she says she's read all of their textbooks before they even set foot inside Hogwarts. In this chapter, she is clearly committed to the idea that a good educational background is the first real key to the success of a spell. This stage of Hermione Granger would be fine with taking notes on wandwork and pronunciation and admittedly, it works well for her.

And it's why the professors at the end of the chapter believe her that she thought she could handle a troll after reading so much about them. A clever lie, but a lie nonetheless.

What I love most about this chapter is not the exciting fight scene where they win by virtue of remembering today's homework and in spite of sticking a wand up the troll's nose. That is certainly fun to see the Golden Trio survive.

For me, it's the "very embarrassed pause" that happens when they get back to the common room in Gryffindor tower. As a fourteen-year-old, I got up the courage one night to ask people I knew if they were my friends because I was being teased for being disliked. It meant that those people realized that while they liked me quite a lot,, they needed to pay attention to how they showed that. Things got much better for me overnight and I still have one of those friends to this day.

The narrator tells us that the friendship with Hermione was "from that moment on" and I love imagining how that played out. Hermione often appears sitting with Ron and Harry at breakfast and hanging out in the courtyard. Their habit of taking certain chairs in the common room probably started that night, too, and I imagine that Hermione's first expression of a love language was sharing her notes.

Lesson Learned: Overcome the embarrassment

It's hard to overcome an insecurity and even harder to admit where you were wrong. Harry, Ron and Hermione form a lifelong friendship because of this twelve-foot mountain troll. We should all be so brave as to see what can happen when we can push past those "very embarrassed pause" moments.