April 13, 2007

Just Scoring Points

By WALTER R. TSCHINKEL

More than 30 years of teaching biology at a large state university has led me to an unsettling conclusion: Professors and students are laboring under very different metaphors for education, and neither group is particularly conscious of that fact.

Let me illustrate my point with a story. I often try to make my students aware that metaphors, though commonly used to help us understand the unfamiliar, can also limit or distort that understanding. Last semester I was discussing metaphors