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Recently, the 7th Grade Humanities class received a kind and generous offer from Rick Wormeli. Rick is a nationally known and well-respected author and consultant in middle grades education. Currently, he is finishing up a book tentatively entitled In the Mind’s Eye: Teaching any Subject through Metaphors and Analogies which will be published in the Fall by Stenhouse Publishers. Rick invited the class to attempt to define an abstract idea two ways, once using metaphors and once without any metaphors at all.
Since April is National Poetry Month and the class was working on a poetry unit, they answered the question, "What is poetry?" Their list of metaphors and attempts at metaphor-free descriptions were emailed off to Rick, who responded, "These are great, Bill! I want to weave them into the manuscript. Let me get as many of them as I can into the manuscript. (...) Please let your students know that they were received and I’m very impressed with their depth and breadth. Wowser, thanks for sending them!"
Time will tell how many make the final version, which will depend in part of course on conversations between Rick and his editor. Any student whose work makes the final edition will receive a free copy of the book as well as a $10 gift certificate to Barnes and Noble.
Three students read these sample metaphors in a housemeeting:
- Poetry is the cloud in the sky. We can't guess a cloud's shape, color, or the weather that the cloud will make. Sometimes the cloud covers the sky, but sometimes it shows all the sky. Poetry is the same as the cloud.
- Poetry is a black hole that you fall in and can't get out of.
- Poetry is a face, which is always changing its expression.
Keep up the good work 7th graders. We eagerly await the publication of Rick's book.