I’m a sucker for good metaphors. When one student wrote an essay about how becoming friends with certain people in high school (e.g., jocks, brains) was like having beneficial mob connections (“jocks� to watch your back, “brains� to help with accounting homework), something inside of me became all warm and fuzzy. I try to encourage such moments as often as possible in class; I particularly want students to think about how metaphor can be used to re-see for hypothetical and practical purposes, and several sections in Seeing and Writing help me do that. After discussing the "Visualizing Composition: Metaphor" section, we turn briefly to the photographs by Tibor Kalman to talk about how the reversal of race in these images helps us see the familiar in a new way; because these images present a different take on what is real, they provide a playful launching point for ways to re-see. I point out that metaphors can do the same. We then turn to the anti-drug ads in Ch. 7. Even if students have never seen the 1987 ad, they’re familiar with the metaphor--the frying egg representing one’s brain on drugs. We talk about the frying egg as a metaphor: What does it mean that the brain is an egg? What assumptions are being made about the brain? What about drugs for the frying egg? Would all illegal drugs have this effect? I ask students to come up with other metaphors for the effects of drugs on the brain on their own, and then I put them into groups to discuss their work: How do these influence their perception of drugs? of the brain? Continuing with the idea of how metaphor can be used to re-see the familiar, I incorporate a practical exercise involving punctuation. Even after I introduce punctuation and grammar exercises, students rarely “get it.� And they’re usually bored beyond belief with such exercises. But this one is almost always fun, and I’m constantly surprised by how involved students get. After handing out some brief examples and rules for punctuation marks, I ask students to consider metaphors for them. Naming all of the punctuation marks on the board, I start them off with the period as a stop sign or a red light. Students quickly get in on the game, suggesting other traffic markers—a “Yield� and a “Slow Children at Play� for the semicolon, a highway information sign for the colon, a “Detour� for parenthesis, a “Duck Crossing� sign for the dash (elegantly defended by one student). We usually have three or four traffic markers for each punctuation mark and students readily demonstrate their knowledge by playfully debating the accuracy of the metaphors. It’s also fantastic to have these traffic markers as references throughout the semester. I can’t describe the joy that arrives upon hearing one student remark to another in peer review, “Dude, you should use a Duck Crossing here.�