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Mahrukh Khan

Michele Tubbs

ENGL 1301

October 4, 2020

The Magical Effect of Harry Potter on my Literacy World

My parents reading to me as a kid is one of my earliest memories I remember. They would

let me pick a book and they would read it to me from that book while I would gradually fall

asleep. This is one of the strongest memories that I have of spending time with my parents.

These books were in my native language, which was Urdu, the national language of Pakistan. I

was born and raised in Pakistan and moved to the United States in 2016. When I moved here, the

transition from Urdu to English was hard for me. I had a lot of struggle with learning the English

language because of the fact that I and everyone in my household spoke Urdu. It was like living

in two completely different worlds, the English world, and the Urdu world. During my high-

school sophomore year, something life-changing happened with me and it had a great impact on

my literacy journey and made me the reader and writer I am today.

I did not even learn English until I had to attend school. The memory of my first day of high

school is still fresh in mind after four years. I walked into my class and I did not know any word

of English. I did not understand what the teacher was teaching me, and I used to panic easily if

the teacher asked me anything in front of the class. In the first years of High school, I was

enrolled in the ESL class where the focus of the curriculum was to learn English. The tenth grade

was a difficult year for me, not only because I was just getting used to the new everything, but

also because I had a tough freshman English class. I was very anxious because even though I

passed my ESL test and was ready to take regular English, I did not feel like I was ready for it.
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My 10th-grade teacher wasn't exactly the best of teachers. The theme of that class was Harry

Potter because apparently, my teacher was a big fan of that movie. She decorated the whole class

with the ornaments from the movie. She divided us into the 4 groups as the students were in the

movie, The Gryffindor, The Slytherin, The Hufflepuff, and The Ravenclaws. My teacher placed

me in the Gryffindor. It made me so happy when I got to know that I was in the same group as

Harry Potter, the male protagonist of the books. To make it more relatable to the books she also

applied the points system that the Hogwarts had, i.e., the group with the most points at the end of

the semester wins. The thought of getting a prize at the end made me more interested in the

books as I wanted to learn more and achieve perfection in my assigned assignments for the class.

It was my first experience with these Harry Potter books. It was also the first time I read a

long English novel and found it so much interesting. I was hooked from the very first sentence

and wanted to read more and more of it. It drove me to read and watch more fictional stuff. After

we finished the book, we had a big project in which we had to create the Hogwarts out of

cardboard. The way I read the book helped me a lot with this project as I remembered the vivid

details from the book. Our group won the competition, and my teacher was so proud of our

project that she showed it to the principal and staff. She also showed us the movie based on these

books. To my surprise, when I watched the movie, I realized that the novel was more interesting

than the movie.

I believe that every fiction expresses itself in its own unique way. Every book I read taught

me something new. I spent that summer reading all the works of Rowling and many other

fictional authors. At first, I thought of fiction as something which is just a lie but that changed for

me and now, I see fiction as something who can lead to personal growth. I enjoyed the whole

process of reading fictional books and became more and more interested in reading.
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This experience was very important to me because I did not recall that before it, I ever

wanted to read anything let alone write about it. This experience made me the reader and writer I

am today. After this experience, I pushed myself to read more and more novels and journals. At

first, I only read the stuff kind of like Harry Potter but then I explored different genres and found

many things that I loved. I think it is very important for my readers to understand my experience

because it can help many people. If someone is also struggling with writing maybe my

experience can help them to improve their reading or writing.