In teaching we use countless metaphors and illustrations to
help teach difficult concepts. However, when you are teaching at an
International School whose population is predominately Asian, you have to
modify your metaphors to make them relevant to your audience. The majority of
your students do not know the
movies/commercials /television shows/music that you are referencing to make a
point. This can be hard especially when you are also unfamiliar with the
movies/commercials/television shows/music that they are referencing. This conundrum
has helped me develop as an educator because when I am lesson planning, I
purposefully look for sources that are not American. American sources are my
default, but I don’t want them to be because simply looking at one source,
gives a person a limited view of the world. For example, today, I showed a
British biography about Ben Franklin. It was interesting because while it did
mention his contributions to the American Revolution; it made it seem like he was
passively involved in the revolution rather than actively helping to bring
about the revolution. It was interesting to notice this nuance in how the
information was portrayed.
Though I am able to find sources that are not American, it
can still be hard to make the illustrations that I use in class relevant to my
student’s lives. But there is one things that we can all relate to and that of
course is FOOD.
One food metaphor that I have used in the past is how a
paragraph is like a hamburger. Now, all of my students have probably had a
hamburger or a chickenburger (yes, that is what we call chicken sandwiches over
here), but I have found an even more perfect metaphor: Kimpbap! (This is a
Korean Sushi-like food, but it does not have raw fish).
For those of you who do not care about my magnificent
metaphor, I give you full permission to stop reading this blog post while I
explain my brilliance.
A Topic Sentence is seaweed in kimbap; it’s the first thing
your bite into, the main idea. Rice is the Concrete Details because without it
your paragraph will have no substance. But if you only have concrete details
your paragraph will lack flavor, so of course you at the filling, the meat,
carrots, radish, eggs, the brown thin sweet stuff that apparently is called
wang —this makes it delicious! Now you have all the necessary
ingredients, but you can’t really eat your kimbap yet – you have to roll (wrap)
it up – this is your concluding sentence. Then all that is left to do is eat!
(I am well aware that writing a paragraph is like kimbap does in fact make it a simile and not a metaphor, but modifying metaphors proves the necessary alliteration that is needed for a catchy title).
