Metaphors We Teach By

The title of this post is of course, a riff on Lakoff’s seminal work - Metaphors We Live By. In that work, he argued persuasively that a metaphor wasn’t just some rhetorical device or trick but rather embedded in how we think and make sense of this world. The very stuff of which we are made.

I return to this topic (see a previous post with lots of thoughts on the topic) because I’ve just returned from teaching intensely over 4 weeks. My students were some very bright youngsters. My mind is spinning, trying to make sense of it all. And so I turn to metaphors to help me chisel away at my beliefs and think through why and how these kids minds were working and learning.

The metaphor I often turned towards when thinking of learning a language is that of “growth”. We grow a language, Chomsky often asserted so. It grows in our mind.

As a tree or plant, students take in the nutrients offered, adapt to their environment and grow (poorly or strongly) depending on the comprehensible input they receive (sunlight, water). You don’t see the growth, it’s mostly invisible. But slowly, but surely, a seed becomes a seedling and a seedling becomes a young sapling and then a young tree and then finally an adult. Bingo - you have high level fluency.

And so, as a teacher, I see my temporary role in the lives of these students I just taught, as one of being their “sunshine”.

What is your teaching metaphor? Or your metaphor for learning language or anything? What is your students’ metaphors for their own learning journey as a student? This organizer might be useful instructionally.

As far as teaching goes, my go-to metaphor is that of a conductor. We organize and direct each individual muscian as we go through our lesson plans. Each plays their individual instrument but come together in a class to make wonderful music together. The song and composition belongs to everyone (the learning) but each in their own way gets there. Teaching is an art, I insist.

Metaphors help us make sense of things and sort out our beliefs. In education, we’ve had many metaphors make their appearance and then rust into disrepute; the banking metaphor, for example.

There is the metaphor of the computer that suggests the brain is a depository of information (knowledge) which is then processed and arrives at answers - output into the public world. This metaphor is under direct attack by cognitive scientists. It is actually an empty brain.

It’s useful to have a metaphor regarding AI. There have been many proposed. The Stochastic Parrot - a kind of mimicry. The Bullshit Machine. Fiction and great authors of yore have wrote about the science fiction of AI.

Myself, I’ve likened LLMs as super-charged advanced word processor.

Perhaps the most fruitful metaphor for AI has been Cory Doctorow’s “Reverse Centaur”. I buy into his metaphor but think it incomplete, not so precise. I prefer my own - that of the bicycle. We use a bicycle for so many things but we ourselves, individually are “driving” and are the engine. We get fit in the process and in partnership with this magnificent machine. That’s the “Ai” I want to see.

Unfortunately, current LLMs are not built for us to be their engine and use them. Cars, are much more what the current level of AI is. They have higher speed and get us places too. But at the cost of our own agency, our own fitness. And one day, they’ll be driverless, than what will become of us? Big blobs of fat, shuffled and fed here and there?

Again, what’s your metaphor? For AI, for teaching, for learning? Let us know with a comment!