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.

I encourage people who teach in universities--and especially humanities departments--to ... stop the professional posturing and prestige chasing and liberate themselves and others into the fields of joy and salutary change that the liberal arts at their best provide. I'd like them to step up and oppose the commercialization of their universities. I'd like them to think less about their careers and more about the hopes that brought them to the study of great books to begin with.... I'd like all of us to have a little more fun.

I'd like us to blow a hole through the university's ethos of entertainment and training for success and to bury its wearisome work-hard, play-hard frat-boy ideology. We should blast away the customer-coddling deans and student service hacks; blast past academic pretension and the hunger for "standing in the field." Blast university presidents so afraid of offending a potential donor that they won't raise a word in behalf of social justice or political sanity. Blow away the trustees who think that they're a corporate board of directors and will not rest until their schools resemble Walmarts. Blast them all. And while you're doing it, have a good time. Because knowledge is joy. Creativity is ultimate freedom. Real thought is bliss. Sapare aude, as the old thinkers liked to say: Dare to Know; Dare to Be Wise!

Mark Edmundson, Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education

Here's one college professor's rationale for not allowing laptops in the classroom.

In most English classes the short story has become a kind of literary specimen to be dissected. Every time a story of mine appears in a freshman anthology, I have a vision of it, with its little organs laid open, like a frog in a bottle.

I realize that a certain amount of this what-is-the-significance has to go on, but I think something has gone wrong in the process when, for so many students, the story becomes simply a problem to be solved, something which you evaporate to get Instant Enlightenment.  

A story really isn't any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase, unless it hangs on and expands in the mind. Properly, you analyze to enjoy, but it's equally true that to analyze with any discrimination, you have to have enjoyed already, and I think that the best reason to hear a story read is that it should stimulate that primary enjoyment.

Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 108

From Marilynne Robinson's Home:

Why do we have to read poetry? Why "Il Penseroso"? Read it and you'll know why. If you still don't know, read it again. And again. Some of them took the things she said to heart, as she had done once when they were said to her. She was helping them assume their humanity. People have always made poetry, she told them. Trust that it will matter to you. The pompous clatter of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" moved some of them to tears, and then she had talked to them about bad poetry. Who gets to say what's good and what's bad? I do, she said. For the moment. You don't have to agree, but listen. Some of them did listen. This seemed to her to be perfectly miraculous. No wonder she dreamed at night that she had lost any claim to their attention. What claim did she have? Could it be that certain of them lifted their faces to her so credulously because what she told them was true, that they were human beings, keepers of lore, makers of it? That it was really they who made demands of her? Her father taught his children, never doubting, that there was a single path from antiquity to eternity. Learn the psalms and ponder the ways of the early church. Know what must be known. Ancient fathers taught their ancient children, who taught their ancient children, these very things. Puritan Milton with his pagan muses. It is like a voice heard from another room, singing for the pleasure of the song, and then you know it, too, and through you it moves by accident and necessity down generations. Then, why singing? Why pleasure in it? And why the blessing of the moment when another voice is heard, dreaming to itself? That was her father humming "Old Hundred" while he shaved. It was John Keats in Cheapside, traveling his realms of gold. No need to be a minister. To be a teacher was an excellent thing.