Rudolph the Red Nosed Rudolph

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The Island of Misfit Toys

Being a teacher gives you little glimpses into what your future in parenthood may hold. I see now that my tolerance for pre-teen girls screaming at each other at 9 in the morning is not high. I am not going to be able to take care of my children's cuts and scrapes because the sight of my student's bloody arm almost made me vomit. And I will force everything I love upon my offspring, just as I do my students.

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys is a CLASSIC. Well, that's what most elderly folks and I seem to think. While my contemporaries dally in popular fare such as Elf and Love Actually, I love fuzzy just-discovered-color films and black and white movies like White Christmas and It's a Wonderful Life that you have to use one of those old school VCR's for. In my opinion, Christmas stopped being overly magical in the 60's. Rudolph was a made for TV movie that aired in 1964 and used stop motion animation which made most of the creatures look like they were stumbling around drunk. The story is based on the popular song about Rudolph but includes Rudolph going on a journey with an elf named Hermey who wants to be a dentist (sadist) and a miner named Yukon Cornelius (probably based on someone from my hometown) who must elude the ADBOMINABLE SNOWMAN, who was the stuff of nightmares for me as a kid, but who my students find "cute-tah." I showed a clip of outcast toys singing 'The Most Wonderful Time of the Year' to my classes and they mostly seemed confused, bored, and blessed with a strange new desire to own a reindeer.

Like a stubborn parent trying to convince their kid that Peter, Paul, and Mary will always be one of the best musical acts around (oh wait, was that just my mom?) by shoving it in their face and forcing them to listen to it on long car rides, so I attacked my students. I played another scene, I showed a presentation, and tried explaining it as simple as I could but it was no go. The girls were over it. So I switched tactics and went for a Christmas game involving candy. They loved it. Predictable little monsters and their candy lovin' ways.

In the game, I included a few questions about the movie Rudolph just to test that they had been paying attention (and to get my revenge on them for not loving it). One of the questions was "What kind of animal is Rudolph?". I had said the name of the movie multiple times in class, had pointed at Rudolph and called him a reindeer to his face, and yet all of my students panicked when this question came up.
"Teacher, it is Rudolph, it is Rudolph!!".
"Yes, I know Lady Hee-Hee, but what kind of ANIMAL is he?"
"RUDOLPH"
Sigh.
This is one of those moments when you wonder if there is a point to teaching.

Later on a walk to get some lunch with Margo on our lunch breaks, I complained to her about this.
"Yeah, they actually call reindeer "Rudolph" in Korea", she explained, "they don't know what else to call it."
It all became clear as day!! That's what my students so easily knew who Rudolph was and this explained why they kept screaming it at anything to do with Christmas! Aw the little buggers just didn't know. It was one of the cutest experiences I had seen of their young ignorance. Well that and when my student wrote in his Christmas card to Santa, "Dear Santa, I want to go to the secret place with a friend. We will play the game and then go home".

I think the secret to getting your kids or students to like what you love is brainwashing. It's really the only way. Keep slyly inserting it into their daily lives and slowly but surely they will start to love playing Mexican Train and eating zucchini muffins and never even remember that they ever hated it. (Shout out to Mom and Dad, thanks for the brainwashing, please send zucchini muffins in the post). It is my dream that someday a Korean child will be unhappily forced by their parent (and my former student) to watch Rudolph and the Island of Misfit Toys all because of me. It would be a Christmas miracle.

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