Special Metaphor Assignment (Blog Assignment 14)

I am one of the six students that got the metaphor in Mr. Spencer's post Don't Let Them Take Pencils Home. To those who missed it please don't take this as an insult, but I thought it was obvious. I guess the reason I understood the metaphor was because I felt that there was no way Dr. Strange would have us read a post that didn't involve technology in the classroom. The context of our class is not about the terrible use of testing in todays schools, it is about the use of technology to make learning better for our future students. Yes, we focus a good bit on how to change this paradigm, but whether we like it or not at the moment all we can do is voice our opinion on how we need to change this broken system. To me a very sarcastic individual I was impressed by the off handed way Mr. Spencer uses his blog to voice his opinion.

To the question of what metaphors I have encountered since this assignment, I could not possibly write them all down because of the frequency with which I use them myself. Like I have said I am a very sarcastic individual, and most of my jokes come form metaphors. I have recently started to understand that this is one of the reasons some of my coworkers find me to be mean. I don't often try to hurt peoples feelings, but sometimes they don't get my metaphors so think that I am trying to be mean. I have lately been trying to cut back on some of the instances in which I use them in general conversation in order to not hurt peoples feelings.

One of the reasons I love history so much is because with the knowledge that can be gained from history we can understand what is meant by certain metaphors. I can think of many times when I laugh at something said in a movie or television show that I laugh at but no one else seems to think is funny because of referrals to certain historical events and individuals. I want to make my students be able to understand those jokes. Sometimes a movie that I find as hilarious most of my friends and family don't like because they don't get the jokes.

I also found this blog post, Metaphors For History, that may help some of my fellow Social Studies majors use metaphors in the classroom.

We use metaphors to explain certain situations or people easier. For example, if we say that the internet is a river of knowledge, we automatically know that the internet is not an actual river, but we understand that it is a constantly flowing source of knowledge. Using metaphors shortens that explanation for us. I hope that we all use this assignment to discover the vast expanse of language open to us with the use of metaphors.