Using Metaphor as a teaching tool...

As an observation of the students that I am working with this semester, my boss and I have have many chats about the fact that the students don't understand metaphor.  Makes it quite difficult to understand poetry, art, and interpretations of history for that matter.  The students seem to be constantly staring at us with blank looks when we use metaphors to explain concepts in music, dance, and history.

One way I have addressed this in the past is to see it from their shoes - what metaphors make sense in their lives?  There is flat understanding when a teacher uses a metaphor from his/her own life that the students just haven't experienced yet.  Example - having kids, being married, graduating, turning 30, spending 5 years working on a degree that you never end up using in your work.  Is it the teacher's responsibility to come up with the metaphors that work for the students?  Can the teacher know the students' experience well enough to do that?  As the teacher gets older and the students stay the same age, does this process become more and more difficult?

I am looking for some research that my old boss told me about sometime that I always use as an example but can never remember who did the research - that our brains develop fully by the age of 25.  Something about the corpus callosum being the last part of the brain to fully develop?  So juniors and seniors in college still have a difficult time navigating things outside of their worldview - i.e. they process things through their own lens and have a difficult time empathising with others' experiences because some part of the brain is not developed fully yet.  It is a difficult world for them because at the same moment, they are expected to understand how to manage their time, be socially savvy, excellent writers and processors of information, build their resumes with heartfelt humanitarian work, and mind their manners.  That's a lot when you are doing it from one perspective.

That's not to say that holding them to committments and expectations isn't important - if you've been aware of a paper that is due on Friday at 5 pm for three weeks (and it is one of those papers that you have to do a lot of work on for three weeks rather than something you can write in two hours), don't ask for an extension at 2 pm on Friday afternoon!  And teachers, it's our responsibility to say NO to the extension.  Of course, in a skillful way that builds your relationship to the student - asking the right questions (rather than telling them, or putting them on the defensive) to help the student understand how they have been managing their time.

OI - so this come back to metaphor?  somehow.  Nuance.  More than taxonomic understanding.  making connections.  I've always been a visual learner - I notice myself, when a lecturer or facilitator is presenting a metaphor to help me understand some concept, I visualize it in my mind.  I draw the picture in my mind of a cave, a fire, a huge wall, and people looking at the wall and feeling fearful of what they see when someone is describing Plato's allegory.

I do my best when I am the one presenting the metaphor to actually picture it in my head while I describe, or tell stories in hopes that the image comes across through my words. Would the Matrix (Morpheus explaining the matrix to a newly awakened Neo) work better for these guys?

Bringing it Home:
Buddhism is filled with allegory and seemingly mythical stories that one can interpret at many levels - stories and hagiographies telling of powerful beings, manifestations of the compassionate mind, legendary diligence, and boundless wisdom.  These stories serve to inspire us to engage - to search for our own relationship to meaning.  It's our responsibility to figure this out.  (Here are some examples in a recent IDP blog...) The point that these metaphors serve is to wake us up.  To shake us from our habit.  To help us recognize our nature through identifying and then detaching from that identification, for we can see that way how strongly we identify, if we pay attention.

I need a metaphor to explain it.  :)