It’s (Not) Just a Figure of Speech: Rescuing Metaphor

P may grind their teeth, chagrin and impatience coursing through their arteries with the above commonplace metaphoric declarations. These declarations pervade what may go down on record as the hottest summer (2012) since weather records have been kept. I won’t concern myself with teasing apart various metaphoric cousins (most commonly, simile, metonymy and personification) on the grounds that all language is essentially metaphorical, and equally important. We essentially think in metaphor as Bartel, Lakoff & Johnson, Ricoeur, and others have also argued. “Metaphor” wrote Jose Ortega y Gassett “is probably the most fertile power possessed by man” (cited in Ivie 1). And yet, we may well wonder why metaphor and other kinds of figurative language have caused so much anxiety in schools. Why has metaphor, in particular, created concern for countless nonplussed and hapless students as they hunted for an example in poetry or attempted to explain what such a metaphor “means?” We encounter metaphorical language daily—language that bears closer scrutiny beyond the typical comprehension-like questions that accompany typical metaphorfocused exercises in literature/language textbooks and classrooms. Consider the following: “Explain the metaphor in lines 5-9 of ‘Love Without Love.’ How does the image of love expressed in this metaphor compare with some of the images you identified and discussed in the section Connect to your Life on P. 346?”1 Our daily activities—thinking, acting, teaching, and learning—are, according to Ivie, “supersaturated with metaphor” (1). The unruly classroom depicted in the cartoon that accompanies the opening pages of Ivie’s On the Wings of Metaphor suggests the classic response of suppressed life to artificial constraint. Centered on a large blackboard is printed the infamous acronym of basic literacy: “ABC.” Looming over a classroom in chaos, a teacher brandishes a horse whip. His recalcitrant, vibrant-with-life students are depicted as animals such as bears, tigers, and lions. They are standing on desks, dancing, jumping, and shouting. One exception: a quiet creature that appears to be a shy, befuddled groundhog wearing a dunce cap, sitting behind a desk in a corner of the room (x). The scene is both hilarious and sobering, representing what many of us in education know to be a clichéd but traditional illusion: teachers have to constantly constrain the life in their students in case it erupts and bursts forth against the minimalistic view of learning that public education has, unfortunately, long been prey to. I am puzzled that in the P-12 educational setting, metaphor remains almost exclusively secluded in the literature classroom, specifically appearing during the poetry unit. All of us use metaphor, whether clichéd or newly invented, without realizing we’re using it. More recent texts for language arts, primarily intended for pre-service language