Metaphors we teach by

How does English differ from other disciplines? After all, math, science, and social studies also require reading, writing, and critical thinking. Such was the question a friend raised to me: why is it we're always "getting into everyone else's class"? What do we have that's our own?

The answer, I think is this: metaphor. I'm stealing unashamedly from Northrop Frye here, who situates English between History and Philosophy: Frye suggests that if the basic unit of History is the event, and the basic unit of Philoosophy is the Concept, then English is really about metaphor. Of course there's overlap, but using language to bring two otherwise unlike things into relationship is the bread and butter of English class. I mean, it's our bailiwick. You know, it's what makes our world go around.

But metaphor isn't really about the cliches I've just used. In fact those happen when a metaphor "dies." Consider the word "arrive": derived from French, it originally described the moment when a ship came to the bank of a river or "a rive." English is full of these "kennings" which have become dissociated from their metaphorical meanings and come to stand simply (ok, metonymously) for themselves. The worst examples of this are everyday objects whose commercial names become synonymous with the thing itself: a photocopier becomes a Xerox; a tissue becomes a Kleenex. Will the same thing happen to the "Internet"--no longer a glowing, "World Wide Web" of knowledge but just a thing we access through the (Microsoft) window of our...I mean, the frame of our...you know, our computer screens.

A teacher friend, Jen, now working in Colorado, sent me this video she used to revive metaphors and remind her students of how important and ubiquitous they and other literary devices are in their daily lives. Wisely, she drew the examples from songs students had listed as favorites on an initial survey of their likes and interests.




While keeping metaphors alive is a worthy crusade for us English teachers, I think there's even more to it than that: when I ask English teacher candidates what made them want to become English teachers, many give responses about empathy: helping students to consider multiple points of view besides their own. Where else but English class could you "walk a mile in someone else's shoes" by reading about--identifying with--a narrator of another race, gender, or social class, or even travel to fantastic alien worlds so different and yet so alike our own?

Now there's a reason for tackling that class of tenth graders. It gives me chills. Literally.