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.

Every year it seems we are asked to do more, though never, of course, given more time in which to accomplish the goals. ... As our classes grow larger and more diverse, the core of our work--teaching students to read, write, speak, and think--grows more complex. Atul Gawande, writing about a similar though inevitably more accelerated trend in medicine, identifies three kinds of problems related to work: simple, complicated, and complex (2009, 49).

Simple problems, explains Gawunde, have established steps, such as using a recipe to bake a cake, one can follow. Complicated problems, such as sending a rocket to the moon, can be broken into a series of simple problems. Complicated problems, such as building that rocket, require greater expertise; however, since this problem has already been solved, success can be achieved with some reliability. Complex problems, such as teaching a class of 35 adolescents, however, have no inevitable, replicable solution given their inherent--dare I say it?--complexity. As a parent of three children (two boys and a girl), I can attest to the lack of any available recipe that delivers a predictable result. After teaching adolescents for more than 25 years, I know only one thing for sure: they are complex.

Jim Burke, The English Teacher's Companion, pp. 48-49

Not long ago a teacher told me that her best students feel that it is no longer necessary to write anything. She said they think that everything can be done with figures now, and that what can't be done with figures isn't worth doing. I think this is a natural belief for a generation that has been made to feel that the aim of learning is to eliminate mystery. For such people, fiction can be very disturbing, for the fiction writer is concerned with mystery that is lived. He's concerned with ultimate mystery as we find it embodied in the concrete world of sense experience.

Since this is his aim, all levels of meaning in fiction have come increasingly to be found in the literal level. There is no room for abstract expressions of compassion or piety or morality in the fiction itself. This means that the writer's moral sense must coincide with his dramatic sense, and this makes the presentation of fiction to the student, and particularly to the immature student, very difficult indeed.

Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, pp. 124-25