Autobiography an example of a metaphor

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Search for:. Proudly powered by WordPress. I find that when I respond seriously, students rise to the challenge, and prepare assignments they are willing to have the teacher read carefully and thoughtfully. Most students choose to rewrite in response to my comments, based in part on the grade incentive — but not completely so, as often students rewrite when the extra points will not affect their final grade.

Personal philosophical writing is not simply a tool for helping students engage with technical philosophies. It is also a genre that offers delightful discoveries for both writers and readers. Students in the course must have a declared philosophy major or minor, and at least junior standing. Thus, traditional philosophical terms and approaches are part of their academic vocabulary, they have done a fair bit of college-level writing, and they are actively interested in exploring their own relationships to ideas.

Autobiography an example of a metaphor

The course gives them a step-by-step opportunity to develop their skill as personal essayists in philosophy while exploring ideas and experiences important to them. Readers who are not personal friends are unlikely to have any particular interest in an author who talks about herself or himself at great length. Instead, readers are likely to be interested in their own selves, specifically in what they can learn from reading the essay.

A good personal essay describes an unusual encounter and tells us what the author learned from it and, by implication, what we can learn from it. To a personal philosophical essay, I bring a more sophisticated expectation. I want to learn something about philosophy, to broaden or deepen my philosophical thought. Thus, I am not interested simply in what the author learned, but in what the author learned by thinking about the experience using philosophical concepts.

By speaking about themselves in a good personal philosophical essay, students speak to others. In this way, they are not practicing a detached objectivity, or a narcissistic subjectivity, but a conscious intersubjectivity. There is no precise recipe for balancing the personal and the philosophical in this genre. To help students develop the skills to find this balance, I try to offer them good models to read, assignments that evoke connections between the personal and the philosophical, and constructive criticism that is supportive and thoughtful.

The readings I use in the course vary but I usually draw them from five different categories, and include one staple. The five categories are:. The Symposium approaches its topic through the voices of eight different speakers. Each speaker uses a different style, and the styles include autobiography, myth, metaphor, everyday experiences, and theoretical concepts.

The subject matter of the Symposium, love and sex, rarely fails to move a student to reflect on her or his life experiences. Before each class, I prepare questions and activities that encourage interpretation and evaluation of the assigned readings. The writing assignments are designed to build skills increasingly sophisticated skills in autobiographical philosophical writing.

The first paper is a short philosophical autobiography, and the second could be described as a WOW journal entry followed by philosophical reflection. The third paper asks for an autobiographical response to a specific text, and the fourth invites an original paper in the style we have studied. The papers are described in the syllabus as follows:.

Paper 1: What made you interested in philosophy, and what ideas would you develop if you were not constrained by writing formal philosophy papers for classes? Paper 2: Describe an ordinary life situation that led you to think of philosophical ideas, and present the philosophical ideas that flowed from it. Paper 3: Write an autobiographical interpretation of the Symposium.

In other words, describe a personal experience that illuminates some section of the dialogue and explain the meaning your experience gives to the section. Because we are working on philosophical skills that favor the often hidden dimensions of philosophy — metaphorical rather than logical, personal rather than public — we end the semester with a discussion of definitions of philosophy and its methods.

The final papers are often extraordinary. They can be humorous as, for example, a student explores free-will and determinism, and with subtle irony blames his poor decisions on circumstances that obviously did not cause them. When I comment on student papers in this course, I use the same principles I use in commenting on autobiographical papers in Introduction to Philosophy, asking myself, what is the student trying to say and how can I help them say it more effectively.

I try to be honest: here I have lost your point among the details of time and place. Here I wonder: do you want to talk? Teachers interested in using autobiographical approaches in teaching philosophy tend to articulate a typical set of worries. Can I require students to self-disclose, and what do I do when students disclose upsetting information?

I would like to say a word about each of these worries. This approach is time-consuming. A teacher simply has to read student work carefully and lovingly. Because this approach is time-consuming, teachers should plan their workload, and avoid experimenting with it for the first time when their other preparation responsibilities are heavy.

Teachers who use autobiographical writing assignments should prepare by reading in the genre and experimenting with writing in it. Only through research and practice will teachers learn how to encourage and evaluate good personal writing. Resources are available to help faculty learn to use this approach. The Art of the Personal Essay edited by Philip Lopate offers examples of personal essays from the last few centuries, along with an introductory essay analyzing the purpose of the genre.

Freedman and Olivia Frey offers contemporary examples of scholars in the humanities and social sciences including the personal dimension in their scholarship. Newkirk explains the aims of teaching personal writing, and suggestions that help teachers meet the aims. And no, of course a teacher cannot require students to disclose anything deeply personal in a college-level writing assignment.

Every assignment must allow students some choice of subject matter. This can be accomplished by broadly defining the topics they can choose, or by allowing them to write about the experiences of others as well as their own. At times, students do disclose sensitive or upsetting information in their personal writing. Teachers can prepare for such situations by becoming acquainted with the resources for student services on their campus.

Campus counseling centers are usually pleased to consult with faculty, and consider it responsible behavior for faculty to refer students. The Dean of Students Office can also help faculty sort out information from students and make responsible decisions about responding to it. Also important are the rules governing confidentiality. And each state has confidentiality guidelines for human services professionals that dictate the situations in which confidentiality must be breached.

In doubtful situations, a teacher can also consult the campus attorney. While this sounds quite serious, it is important to remember that students do have resources for dealing with their problems, and that, in most situations, all we can do is urge to them use their resources. And awkward situations can even have a humorous edge. As long as resources of faculty time, faculty learning materials, and student support services are available, philosophy teachers can feel empowered to experiment with autobiographical writing assignments.

These assignments offer teachers a way to spark and cultivate the inner processes that birth philosophical reflection. Most students will appreciate the opportunities to enter the subject matter in interesting ways, express a sense of wonder, think and write creatively, be heard by others, and learn about the diverse life-worlds of fellow students.

And many faculty will find themselves enjoying the opportunity to teach genuinely interested students who offer endless new perspectives on familiar subject matter. Diane P. Freedman and Olivia Frye, eds. Your email address will not be published. Skip to content Home. Autobiographical Writing in Philosophy Classes. Examples of Student Writing In , I gave the following assignment to students in an Introduction to Philosophy course at a four-year state university.

Metaphorical Thinking as Philosophical Thinking The type of philosophical work I encourage students to explore through autobiographical writing can be described using at least seven different theoretical orientations. The WOW journal is described in the syllabus as follows: Wow journal: This journal is designed to encourage you to notice and write about things you find special or unusual in everyday life: events, activities, feelings, thoughts, movies, music, etc.

Narrative Philosophy Personal philosophical writing is not simply a tool for helping students engage with technical philosophies. The papers are described in the syllabus as follows: Paper 1: What made you interested in philosophy, and what ideas would you develop if you were not constrained by writing formal philosophy papers for classes? In order to show how a man can and should be content when he can ably master day-to-day things, Franklin uses a typical down-to-earth, relatable metaphor of a man keeping his simple razor in order, deriving pleasure from simple daily maintenance.

The Question and Answer section for The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. What plan does Ben Franklin implement so that he and his friends could have more books to read? About this time, our club meeting, not at a tavern, but in a little room of Mr. Grace's, set apart for that purpose, a proposition was made by me, that, since our books were often referr'd to in our disquisitions upon the queries, I now took a fancy to poetry, and made some little pieces; my brother, thinking it might turn to account, encouraged me, and put me on composing occasional ballads.

James Franklin is Franklin's older brother, with whom he apprentices at the printinghouse. James and Franklin do not get along and Franklin runs away to Philadelphia.