judifilksign

hsifyppah, I heart, heart heart you! My students were just plain not getting the difference between simile and metaphor, and persisted in confounding the two, with mix ups with symbols, to boot.

So, I brought in my copy of Steel Cage Match! (Already, I knew my classes would be made of win.)

"You're a pricetag on a sticker; I'm an ebay auction bid" is the favorite metaphor that really seemed to sink home with most of the kids. (I rather think that some of the other techie comparisons were meaningless for their age), but "Whenever you're a perfect 10, I'm playing Sudoku" was also high up on the list, too.

And they *got* it. What use are metaphors? Not only to make comparisons without using "like" or "as," but to imbue the qualities of that comparison in a stronger way.

As one girl put it: "He might like, be a totally kewl guy, but like, not for her. Like, when we were learning unknown words, and you were like, doing context clues, you said that the word you didn't know followed by a list was like, understanding through example. Metaphor is like, making you understand something by like, totally making it the example, not just like, like-ing it to the something."

Like, I think she got it!

One of the guys in a different class thought that "Type Mismatch" was referring to how the class had been confusing the types of simile and metaphor. (I'm clever-er than I thought, doing that.)