The School Marm versus Christmas Cheer

In about five days, I start Christmas/New Years (more the latter here in Japan) break. because of that, today and yesterday were my last days at this school until January, and that means we were doing a holiday lesson, this time centered around Christmas. I'll be doing this again over the next three days, but my dear School Marm will only be there for part of Wednesday.

Originally, I'd split my lesson ideas into The Nut Cracker for the younger kids, and A Christmas Carol for the older kids. I even went out of my way to buy a Nut Cracker doll and brought him with me to show the kids. However, what I didn't anticipate is how little they seemed to actually get either story. The former has basic enough animation to get the point across, but even with that, they really didn't catch what all was happening. The latter on the other hand, I was worried they wouldn't understand at all thanks to the older english it uses, and I was just about exactly right.

It's really kind of sad we're limited to 40 minutes and I couldn't show a more recent adaptation of A Christmas Carol because I love Dickens and I've read a lot of his library. However, the actual book version of A Christmas Carol I hadn't read before, so I did that the other day. It's very short, only a two and a half hour audio book, and it makes me wonder if I'm more affected by sound than I am animation. Perhaps there's a lot more emotional weight to words for me now, but the 'tiny tim' scenes of older animations, especially the disney one from the 90's, never really hit me like it did the other day while I was listening to it. Even music can make me feel more than a video does. Sound is just so incredibly powerful to me and I hate that I can't really share that with any of my classes here. Maybe next year with an older age group.

Regardless, the kids didn't take to it, so I moved to my next target, Frosty the Snowman. Interestingly enough, this has english subtitles, which can then be auto translated into Japanese. The last time I tried this, it didn't turn out very well at all, so I was surprised when what I was reading lined up with what I was hearing. So that's all well and fun, but the english teacher I work with is just such a nag.

Example: we get into class, she passes out these word searches/crossword puzzles I found for them to do to earn a sticker from me, and the whole time, whether Frosty was playing or something else was on, she'd tell them not to talk to each other, not to get up, not work on the puzzles together and all that and I'm just over here watching like, "Bro, it's a Cristmas lesson, this is the do whatever period."

Sure, in regular class periods, whatever. That's not really my call to make and some classes are better than others about this kind of thing, but for the Christmas lesson? We were less strict on this shit for Halloween! Weirdly, watching Luna Eclipsed 8 times in Japanese seemed to be less of an inconvenience to her mood than this lesson was. Either way, this isn't exactly unusual behavior for her, but I feel like the unusualness of the lesson should make her loosen up a bit. It's annoying.

Semi related, during class, she had these super creepy Christmas songs for kids video playing, and all the sudden, I realized I don't know half the words to any of these. You'd think, hearing them all the time from November to January, that I might actually remember the lyrics. But no, apparently Jinglebells has a whole second verse, and Mariah Carey is not part of the traditional Christmas song book. Neither is anything from Rudolph, Frank Sanatra, The rat pack, or Frosty. Save Hark the Herald Angels Sing, which is more of a church song to me, I'm not all that familiar with any of the others. Of course, my knowing that one might be due to the Peanuts A Charlie Brown Christmas OST being played at my house for my entire life. TBH, that more than anything is probably why I like Jazz so much.

Back to Frosty, since my last class of the day is 'Nakayoshi' (AKA special ed.) and there are only two students, I got the chance to actually sit down and focus on watching Frosty this time. For a kids movie, it's alright. For it's time, it's really good. It reminded me a lot of the original MLP series with the human girl and the fantstical creature. The song is a classic and Jimmy Durante just has a voice that sounds like no one else. Rudolph and the Peanuts were the Christmas movies I used to watch as a kid, but Frosty would show up on TV around December back then and I had a vague memory of it. Hocus Pocus (the rabbit) ended up my favorite thing about the movie. Has a lot of character for a mute rabbit and in credibly well animated for the age. There are a lot of reused animations when it comes to Frosty, Karen, and Hinkel, but after watching this about 5 times in the past two days, Hocus definitely doesn't. For the 25 minute runtime and the bare bones story, It's alright.

What this really does for me is make the season 6 episode 'A Hearth's Warming Tale' that much better. They condensed and added songs into the classic Christmas Carol story, set it around ponies that need about zero context to understand and make it fun all in under 30 minutes. My morbid thoughts say Scootaloo would have made a very funny tiny tim in the pony version, but the story just isn't that dark. Maybe I'll take a crack at it myself and do my own version of a Hearth's Warming Tale next week. It's wild to think that Christmas is ten days away. Just like that, enough time for a baby to be born has passed since I've been in Japan.

Anyways, that's all for this week. More Christmas stuff next week and most certainly, Santa Bones.
Until Next Time~
—KCZ