Teaching Metaphor: I, The Window

I am a first floor window. I am a teacher. The school is the house of which my classroom is one room. I, the window, am largely the focal point of the room--not because of any personal inherent value, but because of my transparent quality that enables students to see an outside world. As students enter my classroom they spend much time gazing through me at the sun dancing across playgrounds, fields, and colorful changing-seasons. My students each perceive the outside landscape differently because each sees his or her future aspirations and dreams as clearly as though they were lush rolling plains or jagged mountain majesty. As students learn within my classroom, their perception of the outside world is enriched and grows. Different notions of the outside world are encouraged as are different means of viewing applications of knowledge through me. The standards I am required to teach are the instructions students are given to clean me (to maintain or enhance my transparency), to open me (to perhaps pass into and out of the world from the house in an untraditional manner). I will emphasize filling in the rhyme and reason behind these standards while teaching them so that students will come to have an understanding as to why they would want to look through me to their futures in the world, why it is important to learn the standards (the basic maintenance directions of a window), and the relational nature of the standards not only to one another but also to other knowledge students have or will acquire.