My Asparagus Has Questions for Your North Star

One of the strengths and joys of my being a part of the competency-based education rebellion is witnessing the language of our work unfold in new ways. This is true in any rebellion. It’s never enough to explain. It’s never enough to be right. Our words need to teach and inspire. We need to advocate, provoke, and overturn assumptions. You can’t do that with just prose — you need poetry and music. You need good metaphors. A metaphor is a word for a thing that it is not. For example, if you say, “That kid is a powerhouse!” you are saying something other than that kid is a literal power station. You are communicating something more than factual about that kid. If you say, “This city is a powder keg, ready to blow!” you are not saying the city is made of gunpowder, but something else, something evocative. When Raymond Chandler wrote, “He had a face like a collapsed lung,” he was telling you the guy’s face was not a collapsed lung but shared salient traits with a collapsed lung. The trouble with really good metaphors, the ones that get under your skin and get you up out of your seats, is that if they are recognized as good, then they are adopted by everyone, and they lose power via familiarity. If they are very popular, they get adopted by the status quo system. They are denuded of all color and meaning. They become space fillers that provide cover for the act of doing nothing. They become jargon. <a href="https://medium.com/brain-labs/my-asparagus-has-questions-for-your-north-star-4fad86de4b64">Website</a>