I'd Never Taught a Met(be)phor

In 2003, I was working at a student learning centre at Auckland University in New Zealand, tutoring undergraduates and graduates in university-level writing.

The student sitting beside me was easily six feet tall, broad across the shoulders and a dazzling smile that was currently nowhere in evidence.

“I don’t know what that means,” he muttered softly, pointing to a written comment scrawled across the bottom of his first-year literature paper by his professor. ‘Structural issues’, read the remark.  

“Well, it means that your professor has some worries about how you organize your thoughts,” I said, taking up the paper to skim its contents, “so let’s see how we can make them a bit clearer.”

For several minutes, Lavea and I talked about what structure was, and how it could contribute to an easy-to-follow essay on, in this case, a short story by Ernest Hemingway. I could see from Lavea’s growing frustration that our discussion was bringing him no closer to those techniques that could clarify and organize his thoughts. I looked around, hoping for inspiration, and saw that his backpack carried a patch from one of the city’s local rugby clubs.

“Oh, so you play rugby. What position?” I asked him, searching for respite from Lavea’s growing despair and the chance to test an idea I had about teaching writing.

This was an inspired choice; for the next 5 minutes, Lavea barely stopped to take a breath in recounting the exploits of his Ponsonby rugby club, and his joy in playing the full back position at #10.

“Number ten basically runs the field, doesn’t he?” I asked Lavea. “Tells the other positions what they’re doing, and sets up the biggest plays? Directs the other players so they know exactly what’s coming; where the ball is going to be, and so on?”

When Lavea nodded in agreement, I pointed out to him that structurally, an essay was the same as a game of rugby.  The first paragraph of the essay had to do the same job as a #10; that is, point out what was going to happen, including the pieces of information used to move along the main idea of the essay (like a rugby ball). The final paragraph needed to refer to the strength of the information used and summarize the essay by showing that the discussion unfolded exactly as it was indicated in the first paragraph.

“So it’s just like a play,” I said to Lavea, who had gradually become more animated, even as we shifted the conversation from rugby back to his essay. “Does that make sense to you?”

“Um, it’ll help if I tell them what’s gonna happen?” he asked, peering at his paper.

“Exactly!” I said.

“But how do I keep it structural?” he asked, looking at me intently.

“Well, you can think of ‘structural’ in the same way as ‘organized’; in fact, that word might be easier to understand. How do you keep the players around you organized?”

“They know what they’re supposed to do, but each time, you have to tell them who goes first and where they should be so they can link up with the other guys,” said Lavea. Even as he spoke, I could see from his expression that he had made the connection between the two.

“Okay, so how can we change this essay around so that it’s more organized?” I asked him, but he had already taken the paper back from me and was beginning to flip through the pages with more purpose. He began to suggest paragraphs that could be rearranged, and discovered that the changes would make the essay clearer. Lavea’s demeanour changed completely during the appointment: he left excited and confident about resubmitting the paper. Though I don’t know how Lavea performed on that paper in particular, I do know that I saw him for several other appointments that year, and each time it was obvious he had understood and was applying the writing techniques we had discussed in prior meetings.

I recalled this incident with Lavea when I started to consider writing this blog about Michael Tomasello’s The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition; in particular, in Tomasello’s comments about metaphors and analogies put me in mind of my attempts to use metaphor, in this case a rugby game, to help Lavea understand and improve an abstract concept in writing, in this case, ‘structure’.

Metaphor-making identifies similarities across objects and/or events in order to express one thing in terms of another. As far as cognitive development goes, Tomasello writes in Human Cognition that children combine adults’ communicative purposes/intentions with their own skills in “categorization, perspective-taking, and relational thinking” (Tomasello, 1999, p. 169) to understand and form their own metaphors.

Yet Lavea was not a child, navigating complex linguistics for the first time in order to make his thoughts known, so clearly adults create metaphor differently than children first learning language. But how do they do so?

Northrop Frye pointed out in1963 that metaphor is inherently impossible: ‘As for metaphor, where you’re really saying ‘this is that’, you’re turning your back on logic and reason completely, because logically two things can never be the same thing and still remain two things” (1963, p 11). But adults have the linguistic mastery, and life experiences, to accept paradoxes. And my claim, backed up by evidence with Lavea and other students, is that a wealth of personal experience is essential to understanding metaphor. Without an array of personal occurrences to draw on, metaphors are by definition limited, perhaps not to the level of children learning the language, but certainly in a way that constrains future learning.

There is much to examine in the application of metaphor as a teaching device: current theorists, relevance across disciplines, even intercultural awareness so that metaphors do not contribute to sex-, gender-, age-, race- or ethnicity-related biases. I hope that much of my learning in the GSLL program will explore the field of teaching writing, and more specifically, how metaphors and other rhetorical devices can help adults struggling with writing techniques to define and command these techniques in their own writing work.

...And, in case you wanted to know, in 2003 Ponsonby District Rugby Club won the under-21 championship.

Kia kaha, Lavea.

References:

Freud, S. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved January 20, 2012, from BrainyQuote.com Web site: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/s/sigmundfre151797.html.  

Frye, N. (1963). The educated imagination. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.