Give a Man a Rule, He’ll Learn for a Day; Give a Man a Steady Accumulation of Metaphors, He’ll Learn for a Lifetime
On teaching approach
In Buddhism, it’s said that a teaching is like “a finger pointing at the moon.” The moon (enlightenment) is the essential thing and the pointing finger is trying to direct us to it, but it’s important not to confuse finger with moon. For those of us who are writers, who dream of someday writing a story like the ones we’ve loved, into which we’ve disappeared pleasurably, and that briefly seemed more real to us than so-called reality, the goal (“the mon”) is to attain the state of mind from which we might write such a story. All of the workshop talk and story theory and aphoristic, clever, craft-encouraging slogans are just fingers pointing at that moon, trying to lead us to that state of mind. The criterion by which we accept or reject a given finger: “Is it helping?” –George Saunders, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain
Imagine you had to describe an elephant to someone who had never seen one before. In this hypothetical, you can offer qualitative attributes but not precise numerical specifications. You’re not allowed to draw the elephant. (Don’t even think about using Google Images.)
One strategy would be to list the animal’s characteristics: Color? Gray. Size? Large. Nose? Long. Freakishly long, actually—with a kind of, uh, prehensile snout at the end? The advantage of such a strategy is accuracy, but it comes with a cost, too: lack of coherence. Just three features the viewer may be able to hold together in their mind’s eye—but once you get up to five, ten, twenty of them, the body parts start to accumulate like a grotesque Frankenstein. As in the old parable about the blind men, each component seems to bear no relation to the others.
Another strategy is to try to capture the essence of the elephant. This approach relies less on specifics and more on gestalts and comparisons. “It’s sort of like a big tapir,” you might say. “A tapir crossed with a…walrus? And throw some rhinoceros in there.”
Of course, this strategy is far less precise than defining traits, as evidenced by the image above. The hybrid creature in the mind’s eye is impressionistic and reductive. Crucially, though, it is also more holistic. While “tapir,” “walrus,” and “rhinoceros” are all imperfect analogues for an elephant, each serves as a shortcut for a wealth of information; triangulate these shortcuts, and one starts to form effortless intuitions. (Looking at the walroceros above, you can probably make a reasonable guess about its diet, habitat, and intelligence without any explicit instruction. This is the power of pattern-matching.)
In practice, the two strategies I’ve just outlined are not mutually exclusive: You can enumerate details and also try to drive at the gist.
But my experience as a teacher makes me think we systematically overemphasize the first strategy and underemphasize the second.
Mixing Metaphors
In writing, it’s generally considered poor form to mix metaphors: If you load up a sentence with everything but the kitchen sink, you’ll muddy the semantic waters like a bull in a china shop. (Cliches are bad, too!)
But all my favorite instructors seem to have an endless bank of metaphors, which they mix liberally—if perhaps not so rapid-fire as in the previous paragraph.
I used to have a trombone teacher, for example, who always seemed to be inventing ways of conveying how one’s embouchure should change through different registers of the instrument. “In the low register,” he would tell us, “imagine you’re saying the sound ‘oo.’ As you move into the high register, say ‘ah’ and then ‘ee.’”
Or, more evocatively: “In the low register, imagine you’re emitting an endless lasagna noodle. As you move into the high register, imagine it’s bucatini, then spaghetti or angel hair.”
Or, more grossly: “In the low register, imagine heavy cream is streaming through your lips. As you move into the high register, imagine it’s 2% milk, then skim.” (DISCLAIMER: Do not consume dairy products before playing trombone.)
This example is an elegant illustration of why we need metaphors to build new knowledge. The skill being taught is, for all intents and purposes, invisible. (You can’t play trombone in an MRI machine.) While my teacher could—and did occasionally—give more technical instructions like, “As you move into the high register, raise your soft palate and increase the rate of airflow through your lips,” this information is difficult to translate into real-time behaviors. By contrast, vowels, noodles, and dairy products are all visceral explanations that hitch understanding onto pre-existing concepts.
Keep in mind, too, that this is ultimately still describing physical behaviors; despite its interiority, adjusting one’s embouchure is rooted in human anatomy. By contrast, most modern knowledge work is entirely intangible; its mastery entails “physical” processes only in the loose sense of manipulating symbols on a screen, or strengthening certain neural pathways. This distance from physical reality is part of why most complex skills are so difficult to distill and take years of deliberate practice.
It’s also why some of the best analogies for new skills are not verbally explained; they are experienced.
Living Metaphors
Unlike authors, podcasters, and documentary filmmakers, classroom teachers have a distinct instructional advantage: a captive audience.
That is, when you see the same group of students for many consecutive weeks, multiple times per week, there are lessons you can instill that simply would not be possible otherwise. You’re not necessarily limited to quick and dirty tricks. You can come at the same topic many times from multiple, sometimes contradictory, angles. You can have them practice a skill in one domain then apply it to another.
This last strategy—translating an active skill from one domain to another—is one I’ve come to think of as living metaphors. The basic idea is simple: Instead of telling the class “X concept is sort of like Y,” you have them do some kind of activity before drawing the connection; only then do you say, “Ok did you notice X in that activity? Y skill is sort of like that!”
For example, I once had an education professor, a high school English teacher in Providence, who was always using visual art as a way of teaching literary analysis. For each painting or photograph, the instructions for students were simple: Look at the image and make a list of ten things you notice about it (notice defined as “things everyone in the room would agree on”), then make a corresponding list of ten interpretations.
The point of this exercise is to avoid leaping prematurely to conclusions. Because so many kids (and, for that matter, adults) observe only the finished product of someone’s thinking, they assume that the analysis came to the speaker or writer fully formed. While epiphanies like this may happen, I’d contend they’re the exception rather than the rule. Yet students feel compelled to look at a work of literature and immediately paraphrase the Sparknotes analysis of it come up with a brilliant piece of criticism on the spot.
When we start basic, though—when no observation is too obvious—the task of making meaning becomes infinitely more possible. “The woman on the left is wearing a white dress,” someone might say, as one of their ten observations.
“The background appears to be full of clouds,” someone else might volunteer.
“Can I use the bathroom?” says another.
“Sure…” I say. “Great job! Now what do you think all those clouds could symbolize? And what do you associate with white dresses?”
Then, once they’ve been primed to think this way, we apply the same close reading strategy to a difficult piece of writing: first generating a list of textual details everyone would agree on, and delaying our interpretation of what those details might mean.
More recently, I developed a modified game to highlight for students a key principle in revision. In this activity, students pass pieces of paper around adding a few lines at a time; the end result is a collaborative doodle made according to no individual’s plan. I then ask yet another student to redraw “the picture that the doodle was trying to be.”
The point of this exercise is that creative expression is, very often, a reaction to what’s already on the page—what designer and academic Gabriela Goldschmidt calls “the backtalk of self-generated sketches.” This idea is often counterintuitive to students who have been taught that the only real way to write is from an outline. “Take a look at these drawings,” I tell them, when they’re done. “No one person decided in advance what you were going to draw—yet you still ended up with one coherent picture. Well guess what!? You can do the same thing with your own writing.”
They sit in silence for a moment, pondering the awesome implications. A student raises her hand.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “can you say that again? I was in the bathroom during the activity.”
These living analogies don’t always have to be visual—although I think the best ones often are. (As I’ve written about at length, the visual domain conveys information instantaneously and intuitively.) When I taught Shakespeare, for example, I would have students do the following classic experiment before we started a play. The task? Read the passage below, then summarize it without looking back at the text:
“Does anyone want to try summarizing the passage?” I ask students, when they’re done reading.
Sometimes I get a taker, sometimes not.
“Let me give you a hint that might help,” I say. “This piece has a title that I didn’t share with you beforehand. That title is: Doing the Laundry.”
I project the paragraph again, and the room is filled with gasps of comprehension. They try to summarize the passage, with considerably more success.
“Great,” I say. “There’s an important lesson here. Reading Shakespeare is a lot like reading that text about doing the laundry—his language is really confusing if you don’t already know what the story is about. That’s why it’s so important to read the synopsis beforehand. Reading Shakespeare cold is like reading those instructions without knowing the title.”
They nod solemnly at my wisdom, and I ask them to turn to Act I, scene i of Henry the Fourth Part 1.
Immediately, about six hands shoot up from kids who want to use the bathroom.
All to say: In the moment, students may struggle to see the relevance of these living metaphors, which often feel game-like or tangential to the main curriculum; but over the course of a year or semester, the learning accumulates. (Indeed, research shows that students who grapple actively with novel problems feel they are learning less—but in fact retain more—than students who sit passively through a great lecture.) In time, these activities converge not on a simple motto or thesis of literacy, but on an approach to reading and writing: one that is focused more on HOW than on WHAT.
Making students do these kinds of activities is less efficient than giving them a list of rules. This is both because living metaphors are more time-consuming than lectures, and because they invite more tangents seemingly irrelevant exploration. But living metaphors are much much stickier than direct instruction; they instill lessons that even the most incontinent learners can’t help but absorb.
Furthermore, the squishiness and interpretability of metaphors is often a feature rather than a bug.
Coda: Metaphor as Mistake
In a 1958 essay called “Metaphor as Mistake,” writer Walker Percy describes a fundamental problem with metaphors—namely that they depend, at heart, on a lie:
Metaphor has scandalized philosophers, including both scholastics and semioticists, because it seems to be wrong: it asserts an identity between two things. And it is wrongest when it is most beautiful. [emphasis mine]
In using metaphors to catalyze leaps in understanding, then, we inevitably risk leaps of misunderstanding. We describe an elephant to students—and they picture a walroceros. We point them toward the moon—and they see only our jabbing finger. I think there are two responses to this problem: one which addresses it directly, one which takes it in stride.
First, remember that explicit and implicit modes of instruction are not mutually exclusive. Students can make collaborative doodles and memorize a list of rules about grammar and composition. My own view is that great curricula should emphasize experiential modes of learning but should not shy away from top-down frameworks either.
Second, the very source of metaphor’s power is often the tension between vehicle and tenor. In other words, the gap between X and Y can help make analogies more useful and interesting. (In what ways are X and Y not alike? Is X perhaps more like Z than like Y?) When we don’t have direct access to the truth, this energetic leap is crucial for building new knowledge—Percy again:
The truth is…I cannot know anything at all unless I symbolize it. We can only conceive being, sidle up to it by laying something else alongside. We approach the thing not directly but by pairing, by apposing symbol and thing.
Some of the greatest discoveries are born of misunderstanding, or by applying the insights of one domain to another. To the extent that metaphors are lossy, then, they are also a source of innovation—of unique syntheses that emerge from our reductive, idiosyncratic, self-constructed models of the world. Like the gentle walroceros, these metaphor-based models cannot be viewed head-on; they lurk only in the arctic-rainforest-savannah of the mind.
Like the moon, they form tides beyond our knowing.