1. You can live to be 11 years old and still have to learn how to walk, point, and jump on your first day of school.
2. Good friends lead the way to class. Great friends will wait for six hours outside the Herbology classroom while you run around the castle looking for secret doors.
3. Speaking of which, every painting, bookcase, and funny-looking wall in the world is probably a secret door.
4. If you can type very quickly and with great accuracy, you will jump over buildings and never die.
5. Poltergeists are assholes.
6. There are only three ways to pronounce "Flipendo," and Harry uses all of them.
7. Ditto with "Alohomora" and "Rictusempra."
8. Just going down to Hagrid's hut for a cup of tea is a harrowing endeavor involving fire-butt turtles, death-defying leaps, and a couple of puzzles thrown in for good measure.
9. Sneaking a dragon up to the astronomy tower is easy. It's getting back DOWN from the astronomy tower without Filch catching you that's hard.
10. Also, invisibility cloaks are useless garbage. Just throw yours away now.
11. It's all fun and games until a Quidditch match starts. Then it's 45 minutes of chasing a snitch on a pre-programmed loop around the arena.
12. Nobody knows what Filch is doing with that mop all day, because he's sure as hell not cleaning up the imperial tons of ectoplasm splattered all over the damn place.
13. You can die eight times in the course of completing an assignment and your professor will still only grade you on how many stupid Stars or Challenge Shields you found.
I DIED, Professor Lockheart. The butt-turtles KILLED ME.
14. Somebody should look into the fact that Draco Malfoy is apparently hoarding a near-unlimited supply of colorful explosives.
15. Fred and George Weasley are capitalist masterminds who turned the casual acquisition of jellybeans into a bustling micro-economy.
16. The last thing you see before you die is a sparkling black abyss that is both beautiful and horrifying.
17. Whenever you see a save book floating in a doorway, you KNOW shit's about to go down.
18. If you see an object, any object really, your best bet is probably to try and blow it up with your wand. Just in case.
19. There's no feeling like being super close to death in a boss fight...then realizing that you have a Wiggenweld potion in your inventory.
20. Actually, there is one better feeling: stumbling across the one Chocolate Frog card you needed to complete your collection.
21. In the (edited) words of J.K. Rowling, "whether you come back by page or by [a game where you throw gnomes at the walls and find surprise jellybeans in the toilet], Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home."
