Columnist Susan Snyder: Teacher pays big tab for ‘Potter’

Tuesday, July 1, 2003 | 8:11 a.m.

Harry Potter has cost Laurie Day a fortune.

The third grade teacher at Las Vegas' Mendoza Elementary School spent $300 on wallpaper and other frippery to decorate her classroom like a castle.

"I have stone walls, towers, turrets, and I'm the queen," she said.

She's also an unabashed Potterhead who finished reading the fifth Potter book, "The Order of the Phoenix," within 36 hours of its June 20 release.

She loves the characters. She loves the storytelling.

But most of all, the 18-year teaching veteran loves that J.K. Rowling's series has brought her students back to reading books for fun.

"In my years of experience, I have never found anything that has inspired children to read quite like the Harry Potter series of books," Day wrote me in an e-mail after last week's column about Rowling's newest arrival.

"No tricks. No games. Just a good book," she wrote. "I guess I can credit J.K. Rowling for helping me to become a better teacher. Silly as it seems, I owe her a lot."

Maybe.

But Rowling owes Day about $500.

Sit back. You have to hear this story.

Day didn't delve into Rowling's books until after release of the second Potter, "The Chamber of Secrets." She read the first and second books at home and decided they would be good for reading aloud to her fourth graders.

After reading the first, the students insisted on the second and the third. With each one, students who never before read books were begging their parents to buy the Potter tomes so they could read along with Day.

"Out of 37 students, 30 of them had purchased all the books," Day wrote. "And then we waited."

They were waiting for Potter No. 4: "The Goblet of Fire."

It was released four weeks before the end of the school year in 2000. Day told the children that "Goblet's" 734 pages were too many, and they wouldn't be able to finish it by the end of the school year.

Well, that went over like a bad spell. The kids promised to be very good and do all their homework, and calculated how many pages Day would have to read each day to finish "Goblet" by year's end. She agreed, then struck a tougher bargain.

She would buy dinner for any student who finished the book on his or her own by the end of the year and scored 98 on a test to prove it. Within a week, all 37 owned the book.

And 31 of them got dinner.

"Good thing I got a longevity check from the district that year. That $500 went really quick," Day recalled Friday. "I never in a million years thought that so many 9-year-olds would finish that book in four weeks."

And this wasn't a mass feeding at Chuck E Cheese. This was dinner at the restaurant of each student's choosing.

Six girls who finished on the same day opted for Meadows mall food court. One boy chose Macaroni Grill, and another requested Memphis Barbecue.

"I had another one who wanted sushi," Day said. "It was drama."

She's up to the third book with her current class of third graders, and will be promoted to fourth grade with them in two weeks. Next year they tackle Potters four and five.

But dinner bets are not part of the plan. This teacher learned her lesson.

"I haven't done it since," Day said.