metaphor – The Captain of Class

The Pinned Piece is Powerless

It is common for elementary age students to mistakenly capture their opponent’s King in a game of chess. During today’s chess club, I corrected a couple of kids. “You don’t actually capture the King,” I explained. “You win by arranging the board in such a way that the King is under attack and cannot get away. That is Checkmate.” I asked them to show me how this had happened.

When one of them walked me through the moves, I saw that a pinned piece had been moved, placing the King into check. You can’t do that. I took the opportunity to teach the whole chess club about pinned pieces.

A Pinned Piece in chess is a piece that is blocking an attack on the King. Moving it would place the King into check, and you aren’t allowed to do that.

How does this happen? Sometimes, a piece will be used to block an attack. If White has an exposed King (no White pieces in front of it), and Black moves a Rook onto the same file (vertical column on chess board), the White King is in check. A common defense might be to place the White Bishop in front of the White King. This is exactly what happened in today’s game.

At other times, crafty opponents might trap your piece by passive-aggressively attacking the King. They will arrange their pieces so that they would be attacking your King, if you were to move any of your pieces. You look for a way to shift your pieces into a more advantageous position, but they are locked down. Moving them would jeopardize your King. No can do! You begin to feel stuck, smothered, tied in a straight jacket.

As we were walking down the hallway of my school, heading toward the entrance where parents were waiting to gather their offspring, I closed the lesson on pins by summarizing some of the main points the club had discussed. Without even thinking, I shouted over my shoulder, “Even the most powerful piece can be made powerless with a pin.” That struck me as an important metaphor.

A highly skilled person with a lot of valuable experience is working a job that is way beneath their ability. Why? Why don’t they leave that job and work somewhere with better pay? If they did, they would lose their health insurance. Perhaps a retirement plan is pinned to their current job, and they must wait out the years, until they can cut the tie, or else jeopardize losing all of that savings. Maybe they have worked hard to climb the corporate ladder, and leaving would mean starting at the beginning! It could be pride, money, safety, or more pinning them to their powerless position.

Someone is in a relationship with a person who abuses them. How could they not just leave? Perhaps the abusive person has arranged all monetary and material assets in their name. The hurting individual would have to strike out on their own, penniless, not to mention poor in spirit! Maybe, the abusive person was cutting the person down emotionally. You don’t know how low someone can make another feel. Beliefs like, “I can’t do anything without my partner, because I am so dumb… I need her in order to feel good about myself… I am worthless without my family…” infect the heart and create, not cracks, but fissures in the Love Tank. Power pours out of a person squeezed by emotional abuse. They are pinned to their situation, and you can’t see it at all!

Can you think of any other examples of powerful people pinned to positions? If so, mention them in the comments.

Part of my lesson about Pinned Pieces on the chess board included how to avoid this predicament. “What could White do to get out of the Pin?” I began with.

A sharp student mentioned moving the White Rook over a space to block the pin. “Then the Bishop would be free (unpinned) to move around on the board. It could even attack the Knight on f5.”

“But, not before that Knight captured the Rook unpinning the Bishop, after having moved it to d6,” an even sharper student pointed out. “You could move Pawn to c6.”

“How would that solve the Pin Problem?” I inquired.

“The Black Rook would have to move in order to avoid capture.”

I studied the board. “Could Black simply move the Rook to another square, continuing the Pin?”

“Yes, d5 and d3 are both safe. And, if the White pawn advanced, the Black Rook could simply return to d4,” a collection of students offered.

A student in the back of the room raised her hand. I had to refresh my memory of her name before listening to her brilliant idea: “Move the King to c8.” Not only does this free the pinned Bishop, “It gives the King more spaces to move to. E7 is being attacked by the Black Knight,” she explained. Amazing thinking!

Unpin by removing the threat. Our highly skilled worker who would like to look elsewhere for a job might invest in a retirement situation outside of their job. Maybe they could acquire health insurance through a spouse or alternative situation. The abused romantic partner could find support in people or ideas independent of their relationship. They may not be able to “Block” the abuse, but removing the line of attack by getting out of the way could prove both saving and empowering.

In conclusion, if nothing else, analyzing situations from more than one angle can be a powerful way to govern one’s life. Treat your everyday scenarios like a chess match. They are full of cause and effect that, when analyzed carefully, could be played in powerful ways. This can extend to your life goals, as well. Evaluate your vision for the future. Is it “blocked” by a piece you wish would move out of the way? Are you “pinned” by being stuck where you are? Remove the pin or remove yourself, so that the powerless part of your life is no longer being pinned down. Free yourself.

An Analogy Exploring Bias

Believe it or not, this is NOT a blog about politics.

Growing up, my family was very political. More than political, it was opinionated. And, there is probably an even better word than opinionated, at that!

Assimilating passive youngsters into partisan politics

The dinner table found my dad discussing state representatives, and what they were and weren’t doing to help him. The governor was never doing quite enough for my mom. It seemed like every decision he made was a wrong one. My parents sympathized over spaghetti.

Not everything was negative! There were plenty of politicians who were doing things right, and there were others who were fighting for causes that my parents held dear. These men and women always belonged to my parents’ political party. In fact, the people who identified with my parents’ political party seemed to do NO wrong.

If there was ever a politician from the opposition who agreed with or helped someone from my parents’ party, that person was praised for “Seeing the light.” In the same breath, they would also be ridiculed for disloyalty to their own party.

This mentality went beyond the dinner table. When observing the behaviors of people in public, I overheard my parents suggesting certain individuals probably voted for the political party they viewed as “The Enemy.” I witnessed my parents treat people wearing clothing that supported things they disagreed with badly. Mostly, we stayed away from people who overtly promoted ideas we didn’t like.

When my parents thought that they were speaking in private, I heard them call other people names. The way they said these epithets, it felt like they hated those kind of people. Around me and my sister, nicer language was used, but the message was clear: “Those people are ruining our country.”

Would my parents get rid of “those people” if they could? The older I got, and the more I learned in school, It seemed like you ought to be able to vote bad ideas out of political power. My parents seemed to complain about voting as much as they complained about politicians.

I could go on with this analogy, but I think that is enough fuel to energize my analogy. When people populate their thoughts with slanted views, the way they see the world and its inhabitants is biased. Every action is interpreted through this mental lense.

Rather than politics, this analogy has to do with police brutality. Ijeoma Oluo titled chapter 6 of her book with the question “Is Police Brutality Really About Race?” (Oluo, 2019). The story that she wrote about in that chapter, and what I have heard from other people of color, is a pervasive bias among police officers toward Black people (Eberhardt, 2019).

Oluo (2019) tells a story about her brother being pulled over by a cop. When her brother asked, “Why am I being pulled over?” the police officer retorted with, “Is there going to be a problem, here?” There are many things to discuss in this tiny interaction, but what I want to focus on is the “other-ness” factor.

With racial tensions flooding the mainstream media for months, social media has teemed with personal anecdotes displaying similar stories to Oluo’s. I have seen people post articles and produce data that points to the idea that White people do experience brutality and even death at the hands of police officers (Thomsen, 2020).

The fact is Black people in America are 6 times more likely to be killed during an interaction with law enforcement than White people (Jagannathan, 2020). This stat varies in geography, the rate being lower in some areas and higher in others.

It is like someone took the bias of my fictitious family at the beginning of this blog and transferred it from political opposition to plain old color of skin, and then pumped it into the police force.

I’m NOT suggesting that every single police officer in America hates people of color. The politically charged family of my analogy has an aunt who does not engage in the political banter at picnics. She’d rather just stay out of it. She’ll vote, but she doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other. There is an uncle who actually disagrees with the rest of the family. When the family is frothing about some civic story, he doesn’t feel comfortable speaking up. He witnessed what happened to his brother, who is no longer invited to anything.

Make no mistake about it; Law enforcement is a family. There is bias toward people of color (Eberhardt, 2019). The degree of prejudice varies, but studies show that police officers are more likely to connect crime with color. This leads to pre-judging individuals. In other words people of color are not interpreted as “law abiding citizens.” This is not a blanket to cover every cop, of course.

The metaphor of bad apples has been floated a lot lately. The problem is that it has been misused (Cunningham, 2020). It was originally a proverb of warning that just one bad fruit could contaminate and ruin a whole basket.

What can be done?

Unless the family lives in a compound, each member is going to interact with unrelated people. Individuals gravitate toward like-minded people, so even outside of a compound, cops are not likely to hangout with unbiased folks.

However, there is bound to be a pool of brackish water; A place between ocean and river, where ideas mix, ideologies are less potent. Saltwater salmon swim upstream to lay their eggs.

Just suggesting that police officers have a bias might be a seed for thought that could spur self-assessment. People who are empathetic good listeners could be the mangrove trees that root in the brackish water between ocean and fresh water. These exposed roots are places where fish can seek shelter. Be the mangrove.

Talking about these touchy subjects leaves us exposed, like mangrove roots. But, perhaps someone needs those roots.

The reason I chose to use a family that is fired up about politics is many-fold. One is that this is where we are as a country. Most people have witnessed this behavior on both sides of the isle. Another reason is that political leaning is so ingrained and difficult to see past. It seems impossible to be open-minded to the potential that the “other side” could have any good ideas or do anything right. Lastly, and most dangerously, as each news story blows up phones, ideologues seem to double-down on their philosophies. It is trench warfare. I hope that this metaphor melts soon.

I write this text to help people understand that bias runs deep, blood-deep. We cannot expect prejudice to evaporate quickly or easily. Each person, regardless of skin color, must be seen as a human. Projecting criminality onto color is wrong. “Is there going to be a problem here?”

Sources:

Cunningham, M. (2020, June 14). ‘A few bad apples’: Phrase describing rotten police officers used to have different meaning. Retrieved September 17, 2020, from https://abcnews.go.com/US/bad-apples-phrase-describing-rotten-police-officers-meaning/story?id=71201096

Eberhardt, J. L. (2019). Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do. New York, New York: Viking.

Jagannathan, M. (2020, June 28). Black people are up to 6 times more likely to be killed by police, Harvard study says. Retrieved September 17, 2020, from https://www.marketwatch.com/story/black-people-are-up-to-6-times-more-likely-to-be-killed-by-police-harvard-study-says-2020-06-26

Oluo, I. (2019). So you want to talk about race. New York, New York: Seal.

Thomsen, I. (2020, July 16). THE RESEARCH IS CLEAR: WHITE PEOPLE ARE NOT MORE LIKELY THAN BLACK PEOPLE TO BE KILLED BY POLICE. Retrieved September 17, 2020, from https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/07/16/the-research-is-clear-white-people-are-not-more-likely-than-black-people-to-be-killed-by-police/

Green-Lights: An Analogy Exploring inEquity

A person driving home has to go through the city. While he usually takes the turnpike to avoid traffic, he needs to stop at a store in center-city to make a purchase. On his way to the middle of town this driver is pleasantly surprised to find every single traffic light green. He doesn’t even have to slow down once. This causes him to wonder whether paying the tolls to take the turnpike home everyday are even worth it!

In the specialty store where the man must make a purchase, there is a very long line at the single open register. He contemplates coming back later, but decides to at least scout out the items under the glass counter. A sales clerk asks the man if he needs some help. While he is there and now getting some personal attention, he might as well find out the specific prices of the items he’s interested in buying!

“Yes, may I please see these two items up close?” he asks. Upon closer examination, the man makes his final decision to buy his favorite. The sales clerk chooses to ring the man out right then and there. Neither of the two people engaged in this encounter pay any attention to the lengthy line at the other register that has doubled since this sale began.

How lucky I am, the man thinks to himself, as he gets back into his vehicle to continue his trip home. As he coasts through more green lights, he might hear a hint of a remembrance of someone from the store he just left mentioning the irregularity of the traffic lights today. Why ponder good fortune? he dismissively wonders right before noticing an elderly woman stepping onto a crosswalk.

Our driver slams on the breaks, producing a small screech of his tires. Between the sound and his waving, the old woman realizes the driver is intent on letting her cross. She does so very slowly. With each new vehicle forced to stop behind the Good Samaritan, his feeling of importance grows. I made it possible for an elderly individual to have safe passage across this treacherous road, he muses. The feeling of power is heightened when he allows the now long line of traffic to begin moving again.

Wait! Someone else is getting ready to jump into the road! They are not on a crosswalk, though. Also, they are clearly nimble enough to jog across at a natural break in traffic, the driver assesses. And, the conclusion is to give the jaywalker a warning toot of the horn, while weaving a little to ensure there is plenty of space between the pedestrian and vehicle. With an additional silent internal warning of following the rules and heading patience, our driver dismisses all further thought of the incident.

Had he sat through a rotation of red lights when allowing the elderly person to cross the road? How could every traffic light still be green? the driver wonders as he continues home. There are dozens of green dots dangling from dark metal branches for miles, ahead. They would look like a gloomy green airplane runway, if it weren’t for the buildings lining each side of the boulevard!

Luckily, the road is plenty wide enough for our driver to swerve out of the way of a small fender-bender. It doesn’t look like anyone was seriously hurt, our driver notices as he slowly passes. The hit car must have tried making an illegal right on red, when there wasn’t quite enough clearance, our driver concludes. The city can be a treacherous place to travel. Perhaps the turnpike is safer. No one pulls out in front of you speeding along on the turnpike.

It isn’t until this lucky driver gets safely home and turns on the news that he remembers seeing some of the faces of people sitting at red-lights on the side streets. Coasting through green-light after green-light, our driver turned from time to time, glancing at the cars waiting for their chance to enter this magical thoroughfare. They looked angry and irritated. Come to find out, the road our driver had traveled had been victim to a traffic light malfunction. As it turned out, his drive home really had been magical; The lights hadn’t changed for over an hour. It just so happened that he turned onto the road that had been broken in his favor right when the lights became stuck on green. His brief stop in the store hadn’t been long enough for him to escape this lucky coincidence! He drove all the way home, before city workers fixed the lights, and travelers on side streets could safely exit their parked prisons!

Some couldn’t escape. There were vehicles that ran out of gas, engines continuing to run in hopes that the light would turn green at any moment. These clogged the narrow side streets as others honked at them, trying to get around. Additional fender-benders occurred. Pedestrians jumped to the steps of buildings as vehicles hopped the curb and drove on sidewalks.

None of this was reported on the news. A more important story about a business merger had captured the headlines. Our driver will never learn about the fate of the fender-bender he’d passed during his green-light adventure. A Ford Crown Victoria that was driven by a man who grew up delivering giant cubes of ice, cut from a pond in Northern Maine’s freezing cold winter for summer iceboxes, the first refrigerators, had experienced a heart attack. His soon to be widow was driving him to the hospital, because they thought that they couldn’t afford an ambulance. In his childhood, they would have harnessed horses and sleighed across town, snow hiding all traces of road and property boundaries. Now, one desperate right on a red light found them trapped in a lengthy waiting period while police officers interrogate the other driver. Was he drunk? Driving without insurance? A wanted man? Who knows?

Our lucky driver does remember this green-light adventure one more time. There is a day when he ventures into the city for an errand. Sitting in bumper to bumper traffic, he sees a pedestrian skipping through cars to cross the street. The frustrated driver thinks back to the jaywalker he didn’t allow to pass. Oh, to be free to run around the streets, our temporarily-stuck driver thinks to himself.

But, how free is he, really?

Trust Two-Point-0h: The Heart’s Strings

I have a new trust metaphor for you: String.

When you meet someone for the first time, you might find that you have some things in common. These similarities tie the two of you together. They are usually thin threads of thought that help you relate to one another. “I also have a dog. What kind of dog do you have?” … “Does your dog chew things, too?” Connection, connection, connection= thread, braided-thread, forming string.

If there was something uniquely interesting about the acquaintance; This is a person whom you’d like to meet and spend time with again, you may choose to firmly attach a stronger string to the person, tying it to their garment before parting ways. Then, as you swim through the cave of your life, you may follow that string back to the person.

Perhaps you saved his/her information as a contact in your phone. Maybe you got a business card that you put in a special place. People who spelunk, especially in underwater caves, know that there are two paths of every caving expedition (Bernstein, 2017). The one from the entrance of the cave into the earth is the first. And then, there is the path from the end returning to the place you entered. Cave divers will often have a bright nylon string attached secularly to something outside of the cave and to themselves. Legendary cave diver Thomas Iliffe explains that in addition to losing the path to the exit by forgetting the turns one has made through a maze of tunnels, it is possible to kick up sediment that will blind a diver (Grundhauser, 2015). With the multitude of distractions of life swirling around us, how could we ever find our way back to conversing with an interesting person whom we connected with? Sometimes we must carve out; forming our own cavern of time in our schedules. Even if we do, will that person be able to meet you? Pull them in by reminding him/her of all the many connections that you had formed when initially speaking. You may have to string them along a little, but how much will they thank you when you get together and realize that those threads were the beginnings of relational ropes that you can count on?

While the trust forged in an informal meeting is thin, a measure of how deep it is felt could be found in how many threads there are. You are both human. That is a teeny weeny thread. Perhaps you’d trust this person more than the house plant next to him, but it is very limited trust. Were you to learn that, although you now live hundreds of miles away, you both grew up in the same town, and then you begin remembering with the new acquaintance all sorts of things that the both of you independent of one another experienced that are the same! The shared location of growing up is the source of the threads, but now many are shooting out and attaching, some weaving, some solo, and some loose, maybe even unattached (an experience that only one of you had that doesn’t make a mark on the other). You both frequented the same bookstore. The same memorable clerk sold the two of you books. There was a place in the bookstore where you liked to sit and read; You both did this! It’s possible you sat across from each other at some point in what feels like a parallel universe. What?! Wild. I may not have this person babysit for me, but I’d definitely check out a book that he/she recommended. I would trust their opinion over a person whom I’ve known for years, but does not share my affinity for reading.

How can we make this metaphor useful?

When forging relationships, look for and celebrate similarities. Rope is a bundle of flexible fibers (How Products Are Made, n.d.). If you want a student to trust you, tie him or her to you as you lead them through a windy, dark cave of learning. Make sure that the rope of trust is tight and strong. If you dive into teaching with an un-secure knot, the kid could come loose and drift away. They may need constant reminders to find the rope, hold onto the rope, don’t lose the rope… If the rope is not strong enough, the student could get snagged on an idea and the tension could cause the string to snap. Do not assume that a teacher-to-student relationship automatically forms and ties knots of strong string. That is merely a thread, and the end is stapled to the student. If you don’t work on it, the thread will slip right through that staple.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

A mountain climber will have safety lines attached to him/her when scaling the side of a cliff. If a rope breaks or comes loose, the secondary string keeps the climber safe. He/she reattaches the primary rope and continues. When building trust with students, have many lines. Attach them all over your pedagogical pinnacle. Make connections between lessons, and connect those to the backgrounds of your kiddos. Weave a whole safety net of trust so that students feel comfortable performing trapeze tricks of practicing newly learned skills, swinging from concept to concept. They should behave as if they will just bounce if they were to fall. Falling (failing) could very well be even more fun than completing a trick! But, if they stick that tough trick, the whole world will know, because friends will shout from the mountain sides.

Perhaps there’s a pupil whom you have a hard time making connections with. There just doesn’t seem to be much that the two of you have in common, or maybe he is not interested in forging a bond with you. Find one thing that you can hold onto; one thread; and coat it with additional flexible fibers of support every time you see the student. If they play a sport, learn everything you can about the sport and mention one thing each time you see this person. Don’t over do it: That could strain the thread and it could snap. If the student feels like you are stringing him along, he could pull away, breaking the thin thread of trust. Add a new fiber, one at a time, and eventually you’ll have a colorful, strong mountain-climbing rope attached to that student. When he finally realizes all of the work that you put into researching the thing that matters most to him, he’ll know how much you care about him.

In a previous blog about trust (“Super Highway”) I had mentioned the connection

8210762750_7642b21e39_b — This reminds me of the old can and string phone.

between neurons. Myelin coats the axon that sends information between connected neurons. The myelin acts as an insulator. The more there is the faster the information travels between the two brain cells. Your brain wants to send information speedily. That helps you think successfully. It can’t coat every connection with extra myelin, and you wouldn’t want it to. The best is for the brain

to choose the most helpful pathways of thinking and coats those with extra myelin. It’s your job as a communicator in the classroom to figure out the best connections to have with students and coat those connections with extra attention, understanding, and interest. If you do this, you will be able to communicate learning experiences more clearly and quickly with your students.

Before I end this analogy, I want to mention the problem of misplaced and broken trust. First of all, the thickest rope has its limits. In fact, mountain-climbing rope has many styles, gauges, and types (REI co-op). Is it possible that you were putting too much trust in a connection? Were you counting on a shared similarity with a student too much? Perhaps you need to attach some safety lines. Here’s another idea: When mountain climbing, you DO want strong rope, but you don’t want to have to carry a million pounds. You have to balance being trustworthy without burdensome.

I like the metaphor of rope for trust, because it has a lot of give. It takes quite a lot of force for even a little thread to break. The trust can snap, but it withstands pressure. One thing that will cause a string to break is when it wears down. This would happen if it were rubbing on a sharp edge. Trust will wear down if there is too much friction, also. Keep this in mind; The heavier the weight, the more friction and faster decay of the line of trust.

This thread/string/rope analogy for trust can go on and on. I would love to hear what you think of it. Please, add to it by commenting below. Share personal experiences, insights, additional metaphors and symbolism, and also diverging thoughts.

Sources:

Bernstein, D. (2017, June 23). Under the Mountains: An Idiot’s Guide to Caving. Retrieved December 9, 2019, from https://www.theoutbound.com/dan-bernstein/under-the-mountains-an-idiot-s-guide-to-caving.

Grundhauser, E. (2015, October 23). Cave Diving Is Every Bit As Dangerous and Wonderful As It Seems. Retrieved December 9, 2019, from https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cave-diving-is-every-bit-as-dangerous-and-wonderful-as-it-seems.

Tag: metaphor