One reason I love this scene from Rise of the Guardians is the fact that it reminds me of what it means to be an English teacher.

The first part of the scene reminds me so much of teaching writing. In this scene, Jack Frost has just been chosen to become a Guardian, so he has been kidnapped and brought to the North Pole. Here, Nicholas St. North forces Jack to start to figure out and articulate who he is. What drives him? What is his center? Jack is being forced to start to think through and articulate a deeply important concept--who he is--and to make it clear to himself and others. In other words, Jack must learn to speak and act with conviction. 

Like Jack Frost, many of my students, when they first start writing in college, can't really wrap their minds around what they're trying to say. They are vague. Their minds are cluttered. They don't really understand what they read or what they think. And I am trying to help them think it through, and learn to say it - to articulate it clearly. 

The last part of the scene reminds me of what it's like to teach literature: We teachers of literature try to open our students' eyes to marvelous works--and not just marvelous works, but the realities that these works are about--the beauty of nature, the amazing reality of love, the glory of God . . . whatever wonder that the author is writing about.

Stories, poetry, music, art--these things remind us that this world really is full of wonder. But we miss all that wonder when we are so busy that we can't notice it all around us. When Santa tells Jack Frost that it's his job to help young people get a sense of wonder in everything, I'm reminded of how I feel when I teach a poem like Gerard Manley Hopkins' "God's Grandeur," or John Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," or a story like C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. I want my students to gain the same sense of wonder that Nicholas St. North has.