(Now this would be an excellent location to blog from - wonder if KJS will check in or is she passing it up to be the featured keynote speaker at the 7th Annual Cornelius Fudge Celebration Dinner at the Marriott?)The Toronto Star reports:
Teachers and academics descend today on one Sin City hotel being transformed this weekend into the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for a Harry Potter conference.
Among about 1,200 muggles flying in on planes — not brooms — for the academic conference, called Lumos 2006, are about 40 Canadians, including teacher/librarian Deanna Lombardi.
Her main mission is to bring back a little more Harry Potter magic for her students at St. Michael Catholic Academy in Thornhill.
But for this über-fan, the convention work won't be a hardship.
Lombardi, who has a collection of Harry Potter striped scarves, calls the event "a Harry Potter playground for adults."
She's studied the Lumos program rigorously and is eagerly looking forward to a talk by Tom Morris, author of If Harry Potter Ran General Electric, and another roundtable discussion on "Moral Alignment in Harry Potter."
Between dozens of teacher-geared sessions such as "The Hogwarts Model: Educational Theory and Practice in the Harry Potter Novels," there will be water quidditch at the hotel pool and live chess in the evenings.
Lombardi is among the growing number of educators who have seized on the popularity of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels to encourage her students to read.
She uses the books in her Grade 5 novel studies and says they are among the most popular in the St. Michael's library.
"The Harry Potter books literally fly off the shelves. I'm having to repurchase them. Some haven't been returned," she said.
"In Harry we see the virtues of courage and strength. He's had to overcome so many difficulties and challenges in life. That's a great lesson for children to get nowadays."
Lombardi's favourite in the novel series is the fourth volume, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
"The Triwizard Tournament, the uniqueness and the ingenuity of just developing something like that ... " she says, her voice trailing off.
"For J.K. Rowling to actually write that and create it, it really gives the readers a lot to visualize."
But until Sunday, Lombardi won't have to depend on her imagination to see Rowling's world. At Lumos, she'll be immersed in a rendition of Harry's world in which a hotel room becomes the Great Hall and convention delegates are assigned a house, each with a common room for mingling and relaxing.
Lombardi has requested membership in the Gryffindor House. "It is the house that the brave and daring belong to. Of course, it's also Harry Potter's house — who wouldn't want to be part of the chosen one's house?" she said prior to leaving for Vegas.
Evenings at Lumos will feature Hogwarts night classes and feasting. Muggles — humans to those who haven't read Harry Potter — and wizards will dine on padfoot stew, Aunt Petunia's violet pudding and cornish pasties.
The hotel pubs will be pouring Butterbeer, Morsmordre margaritas and Pansy Parkinson's frilly pink martini.
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