I am stupid...

This reminds me of an experience that I had while observing students in a private school in Troy. I was talking to the students rather in depth about similes and metaphors (an especially fun topic for me) when one student said “I am stupid”. I had worked with this student on many occasions and had seen him make great strides in both his math work and his writing skills. He had come to the school a little late and was obviously dealing with some incredible circumstances outside the classroom (he wore an ankle bracelet which was used by probation to track him). I could tell that other kids thought he was indeed “stupid” and could see that he had internalized this view of himself, but soon after we showed everyone that this individual was the farthest thing from stupid. “That is such a great example of a metaphor,” I said quickly after Terrance’s assertion that he was stupid. I fielded some ideas from the classroom on what a metaphor really is and we came to an agreement that a metaphor is something that stands in place for something else, but may or may not have any real connection to it. In other words, if I assert that I am a bull, a jackass, or even an idiot I am not saying literally that I am these things – I am simply transposing some quality associated with the term to myself. I am saying that I have the strength of a bull or the IQ of an idiot (jackass is even more interesting in that there does not seem to be any real correlation between a donkey and an individual’s level of responsibility or intelligence). I then showed this student that whether he had intended it or not he had used the metaphor “stupid” in describing himself which was also a word which had no real correlation to him and therefore was insignificant. This helped us in two different ways. Most importantly it showed Terrance that he was not really stupid at all, but it also gave Terrance such an in depth understanding of what a metaphor is since it was connected to something he was already familiar with (associating himself with the conceptuality of “stupid”).