If+____+Were+___+Standard+2.4

Extended Metaphor Free-Write: If (blank) Were (blank) Yesterday we had a lesson on the two types of analogies: simile and metaphor. In this exercise, you are asked to write a narrative in which you describe an extended metaphor. As a template, I would like you to use the frame "If blank were blank." In other words, pretend what the world would be like if something was literally something else. Before you begin, I will read a sample written by the wife of one of my professors from the University of Cincinnati. In her piece, she writes an extended metaphor in which she imagines what it would be like if the feeling of "heartbreak" were personified and represented in ham. Sounds strange, but give it a try.


 * Directions:** After listening to "Life With Ham" compose your own narrative centered around an extended metaphor. Please write for the entire fifteen minutes. I do not expect you to have a completed piece, rather I want to see effort on this exercise demonstrating your knowledge of metaphor.

Note: Below is a copy of "Life with Ham": the piece from which I based this free-write activity.

Life with Ham If heartbreaks were hams, a delivery boy would ring the bell the morning after the breakup, his arms full of smokehouse sorrow, spiral cut. In the weeks to come, you use the ham in sandwiches and casseroles. Soups and quiches. Omelets. Tacos and pastas and pies. But no matter how much you consume, the ham never gets any smaller. Instead, it grows pinker, occasionally bleeds when you bite into it, and the scent of hickory permeates the house, puffing from the windows so your neighbors lift their heads to sniff the air. Just when you think you’ve gotten used to this state of affairs (used to the flensing light of morning, used to the stickpin days, used to your car grinding, your pencils snapping, your head threatening to split like a melon in your hands), the ham begins to cry at night in the fridge—long ululations so mournful that the dog hides under the bed. The ham is lonely with your lettuce; the lettuce never listens. Lonely ten times over with your cheese. Your olives are clubby and disdain it. It is friendless among the jams, repulsed by the propositions of your Dijonnaise. At three a.m. you stagger from the bed, torn from the comforts of dream. The ham cowers under your glare, huddles behind the bulwark of the milk, then, in a show of hope, peeks out. Henceforth the dog snores at your feet, and the ham, hiccuping softly, nestles against your ribs. Now when you walk the dog, the ham comes too, and it seems happy to tumble briskly along at your side. In the park, you see other people with hams. One woman has dressed hers in a bonnet and is wheeling it around in a stroller. Near the water, a jogger scolds his ham and kicks it if it gets in his way. Another woman reclines on a bench, reading, occasionally reaching over to pat the ham sitting next to her. You walk, and the sun makes claims on your senses, chasing the chill from your skin. The lake ripples and shines, a blue elucidation, like a bell that melted while sounding its clearest note. The grass is springy underfoot. Soon the wind kicks up, and the dog lunges after mini-cyclones of leaves, dragging you with him, nearly ripping off your arm, and you are laughing. At home your ham seems less juicy, tinged with gray. Sticks and grass are stuck to its honeyed glaze. You mean to clean it, to sigh and weep the way it likes, but you forget, then stumble over it on the way to the john. That night, in sleep, you push the ham from the bed, and it rolls down the hall and out the dog-door. Tumbling along the street, it careens off the curb, then bounces down the steps at Haskell High. The ham is ragged by Third Street. By Tenth, it’s a muddy pulp. As it splashes through puddles and weaves through traffic and trundles over gravel and braves the tires of the crosstown bus, your ham is shredding, leaving slices of itself along the road, under bushes and cars, dropping pink portions at intersections, and by the time it arrives at the house of your former love and bumps its way onto the porch—past the dim flare of the geranium and the rusting ten-speed and his favorite worn brogans left out of habit by the door—by the time the ham rocks to rest on his mat, there is nothing left but bone.

I believe the above exercise is a strong example of how I implemented critical thinking within my classroom because not only was the activity borrowed from an exercise I did at the University level, but also because the prompt itself is at the synthesis level of Bloom's Taxonomy in which students must combine two different elements into one coherent and creative extended metaphor.