Back to school night Hogwarts edition

I've been referring to C's new school, a Jesuit high school, as Hogwarts because the place feels like magic.

But "Hogwarts" seemed a stretch: How could a real school be Hogwartsian? I kept thinking I must be exaggerating, or missing something. Or possibly dreaming.

Thursday was Back to School night. Afterwards, on the drive home, Ed said "It's Hogwarts." So that's two of us.

Why is it Hogwarts?

I don't know.

Some of it is the physical layout of the building, which is nothing like the schools I'm used to. For one thing, it has practically no windows. The effect is to make you feel, not too long after you've gone inside and gotten disoriented and turned-around thanks to the unconventional layout, that the outside world has vanished. The school is your world now.

The school-world is a rabbit's warren of dimly lit hallways and out-of-the-way stairwells. The halls are exceedingly narrow, so narrow that the words "not built to code" have popped into my head unbidden both times I've walked through them.

The halls are so narrow, and so unconnected to any central corridor or architectural heart of the school, that they feel like secret passageways. At one point, seeking the biology lab, I asked directions of the polite and well-turned out young man standing at his post near the intersection of two corridors, his mission for the evening to re-direct the hopelessly. He turned, pointed down the hall we had just searched, and said, "Turn right at the end."

Following his eye, I saw only the same dead end we'd encountered the first time we tried to find a biology lab down that way. But we about-faced and walked to the end of the hall again, where, this time, a right turn materialized, and then a left turn, and suddenly we were inside a biology lab at the front of which stood a biology teacher.

That's another thing: the teachers seem all to exist inside their classrooms and nowhere else. These are their rooms, their domains; they aren't just using the room for a period or two, or passing through. And all of the teachers are characters. More on that anon.

I had been telling friends that the place was joyous and strict. That's the way it feels, from afar. Ed said, at the end of the night, that the school is both "more serious and more fun" than a regular school.

That's not a bad description of the real Hogwarts, if you think about it, a place so serious a boy playing Quidditch could plummet to his death, and yet no one ever does, and you know the children are safe.