Homeschool Fiction

The following post is a guest post from my 11 year old Always Unschooled daughter, Zoë. This is her very first written report and she’d like to share it with the world. She wrote it for the Harry Potter class that I wrote about in my “My Unschooled 11 Year Old — Right Now” post.

The Time-Turner and Time Travel

Yes, time travel really does exist. I haven’t done the larger kind myself, but I have a theory on how it works. Time is always sliding under us making it so we all are always time traveling, but only at the speed of about one minute per minute. To time travel more quickly forward or to the past you have to bend the space-time continuum in the fourth dimension (time) so that two points touch. This part is a real theory in Physics. In fiction, time travel can be done in many different ways by many different devices. Some of the theoretical fictional devices are: the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimensions In Space) from Doctor Who, the Time-Turner in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3), the Omni in Voyagers!, and the DeLorean car in Back to the Future. When traveling in time, no matter the means, some very interesting things can happen.

In this paper, I am writing about the Time-Turner in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. This means of time travel is a necklace worn by the user(s) with a turnable or twistable pendant that can look many different ways. In the book at the beginning of Chapter 21, the Time-Turner is illustrated as a regular hourglass pendant. In the movie adaptation, the Time-Turner is shown as a gyroscope-like pendant with an hourglass in the middle.

This second version has inscriptions on each ring of the gyroscope that read: “my use and value unto you are gauged by what you have to do” on the inner ring, and “I mark the hours every one nor have I yet outrun the sun” on the outer ring. The inscription on the outer ring suggests that either the user cannot travel back in time a whole day or cannot travel forward in time faster than normally. It is shown in Chapter 21 that one turn of the hourglass is one hour back in time. But one thing is for sure, you cannot travel forward in time a whole day! However, in the book, nobody goes back in time more than a few hours. Also nobody goes forward in time, so most likely J. K. Rowling’s interpretation is that the Time-Turner does not allow either.

In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the character of Hermione is the lucky user of the time traveling device. Hermione gets the Time-Turner in Chapter 5, right before the house sorting. Professor McGonagall calls Hermione in to her office, but we don’t learn exactly why until later. Throughout the book, Harry and Ron try to find out how Hermione gets to her classes that are at the same time. Sometimes she mysteriously turns up at the beginning of a class when she didn’t go to it with Harry and Ron. It is a mystery until Chapter 21, when Hermione tells Harry that she got the Time-Turner from Professor McGonagall on her first day back at school and she’s been using it to get to all her lessons. She turns back time once one class ends and then goes to another class.

When time travel is mentioned in fiction, many different types of paradoxes are often discovered by the characters. In this book, the characters witness several predestination paradoxes. This is a situation where a character goes back in time to do something because they’ve already experienced the results of that action. Here are some examples of predestination paradoxes from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban:

1. In the movie version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, when the past Harry, Ron, and Hermione aren’t leaving Hagrid’s house, Hermione gets hit with a snail. She turned around to see who threw the snail, and saw people coming to the house and so the three of them decide to leave. Then when the future Harry and Hermione save Buckbeak, Hermione notices the three of them from the past aren’t leaving. Then she remembers the snail situation, sees one, and throws it at her previous self. This is a classic paradox.
2. In Chapter 21, when Harry sees the dementors attacking his previous self he knows he can cast a Patronus and defeat the dementors because he saw it be cast before. He had originally thought it was his father in Chapter 20, but it became clear to him that it was actually himself once he was casting it.
3. In the movie version, Hermione hears a werewolf call that distracts Lupin away from their group. Later, Hermione recalls the call from before and, seeing herself and her friends in danger, makes the werewolf call herself. Thus, she was the one that had done it in the first place.
4. In Chapter 16, Harry and Hermione hear “a jumble of indistinct male voices, a silence, and then the unmistakable swish and thud of an axe.” This has them believing that Buckbeak is dead. Later in Chapter 21, Hermione realizes (once they have time traveled back a few chapters later, after the part of the book in the shrieking shack) that she needs to save Buckbeak by using the Time-Turner. It turns out that the noises they heard were made for different reasons than they had originally thought.

In conclusion, time traveling in fiction can be done through a variety of really fun devices. There’s both the everyday minute per minute travel and the more exciting travel into the past or further into the future. Time travel can be very useful as it was for Hermione with her classes and for Hermione and Harry to save the day. Time travel can also be very confusing and even dangerous because of the paradoxes. But most of all I think it’s really fun and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban could not have existed without time travel.

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• My Unschooled 11 Year Old — Right Now
• FICTION: Storytime PART ONE (Guest Post)
• FICTION: Storytime PART THREE (Guest Post)
• FICTION: Storytime PART FIVE (Guest Post)
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By: Lisa