I missed the metaphor in Tom Johnson/John T. Spencer's post. Why? I'm guessing simply because it did not strike me as an odd enough post to think hard about what pencils could be a metaphor for. I found a completely different meaning in the post, was satisfied with my meaning, and therefore did not dig deeper. Clearly, I should have thought harder about it.
Considering I spent the week performing in the musical "Honk!", metaphors were abundant for me. Leaving out the metaphors galore in the script, one humorous one comes to mind. When we give a bad performance, we might say, "That show was a load of crap." Umm, clearly, it was not literally. For homework, I might say an assignment is a pain in the butt. This is not true unless I have been sitting too long working on it.
How can we help students understand metaphors? I feel practice is the only way. For one, I knew what a metaphor was and still missed the point - one has to find sarcasm and context clues like it to consider something as a possibility for a metaphor. Beyond that, it is really difficult to "teach" someone to recognize them, in my opinion.
Metaphors can be used for a multitude of reasons. For one, they can add humor to a subject. Furthermore, they can allow us to say things that we could not politely say. They sometimes make explaining a difficult subject easier.
In conclusion, metaphors can be a valuable teaching tool, and we as teachers must learn to see and understand them.
I agree wholeheartedly! I believe that I missed the metaphor because I didn't strike the metaphor as odd either. We're almost towards the end! Keep up the good work!!
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