Eighteen Shoes on the Road
Analogies as Teaching Tools

I jerked all of my husband's shoes out of the closet, took them outside, and lined them up end to end on the side of the road. Why? Because even though my daughter is bright, even after three years of home schooling experience, even with the perfect curriculum for our needs, I still could not get her to understand a simple math concept.

Perhaps you have had the same frustration. You want your child to learn, and not only to learn, but also to learn how to think for himself. However, the curriculum is just a tool, a means to that end; it cannot do the job by itself. Although your child is smart, he will not automatically grasp every concept you introduce. The fact that you have been able to get him to grasp similar concepts in the past does not mean you will succeed today. What do you do when you have sucked every bit of muscle out of all these resources-the curriculum, your child's intelligence, and your experience as a teacher-and you still get nowhere?

One thing that has helped me through many a pile of facts to be memorized (and hopefully understood) is to teach by analogy. C. S. Lewis did it with The Chronicles of Narnia. Jesus did it with the Parables.

On a much lighter and simpler level, I have used this method for science facts. The analogy can be very simple, such as the fact that our extremely obese cat is matter because he takes up space and has weight. (He takes up a lot of space, and has a lot of weight, especially after he's been sitting on your lap for twenty minutes, but that's another story!)

Conversely, the analogy can be complicated, such as the time my daughter Debbie was in second grade and I was trying to help her "get" photosynthesis. I told her that the leaf makes the food for the plant. It started out as a simple memory tool, a hastily drawn cartoon to illustrate the concept for her so she would remember it. I drew a leaf wearing a chef's hat. However, I found that the next thing I had to teach went along with the analogy. So now my cartoon had a tree sitting at the table with a red-checkered napkin around his neck, banging his knife and fork on the table and hollering for food. The stem was the waiter serving the food, and the roots were the errand boy who went out to the twenty-four hour grocery store (the soil), and brought back nitrogen and water as ingredients for the tree food. All of this was in cartoon form and quite off the cuff. Debbie aced the test and still remembers the facts today, in fourth grade.

Sometimes I wrack my brain for an appropriate analogy, but the creative juices just aren't flowing. Other times my daughter is simply not interested because the subject is not relevant to her. Take math word problems, for instance. Debbie needed to learn how to read a word problem and figure out what process to use to figure it out. Every day, however, brought more lengthy explanations and missed problems.

One evening, after school time, as Sam and Debbie were playing their favorite video game, my husband Sam exclaimed, "She just did math in her head!" She had multiplied to find out how many lives she had acquired over several stages of the game. A light then went on in my head. I pulled out the math paper for the next day. The word problems were things like, "How many miles?" and, "How much for three cans of beans?" She needed the math to be meaningful to her. So I started rewriting her word problems each day. All the generic characters like Bill and Sue in the problems had their names changed to those of characters she knew and loved. I used the same amounts as the book did. If the book used dollars or yards in the original problem, I would use dollars or yards in the rewritten one. Therefore, the answer would still be thirteen, but it would say, "Thirteen lives in the first stage," instead of, "Thirteen yards of cloth in the first quilt." The process of rewriting each word problem can be tedious and requires some creativity. Furthermore, it has not brought overnight miracles. Nevertheless, the problems are interesting to her now, and Debbie is well on her way to grasping the concepts.

Another way I have used the idea of making things relevant to her is by rewriting her grammar sentences. You know the ones. They were the sentences that made you groan when you were a student, and that make your kids groan now-those boring sentences where you have to go in and insert the appropriate punctuation or capital letter.

Now, to make it more personal and interesting, I browse her assignment to see what is required in each sentence. For example, if a name needs to be capitalized, why should that name be Joe when it could be Frodo? If she is currently interested in The Lord of the Rings, why not take advantage of it? I've written more sentences (and math problems) about hobbits than I can shake a stick at. The funnier the sentence, the better!

What about those times when an analogy can't be found or the interest approach is even failing? After all, if Debbie does not understand there are 12 inches in a foot, it is not going to make a difference whether Frodo is doing the measuring or not. Desperate times call for desperate measures and desperation is the mother of "teaching by making it ridiculous."

I read somewhere about a teacher who wanted her students to memorize a certain formula, so she literally "wore" the formula, written in fluorescent ink, all day long. She taught for a whole class period and never once mentioned the formula, but by the end of the class every student had it memorized.

This story is what inspired me to take all of Sam's shoes out to the side of the road and line them up, end to end, sneakers, house shoes, dress shoes, boots, even flip-flops. Sam's shoes (size 12) measure approximately 12 inches each. I'm sure Debbie thought, "Mom has finally flipped."

As the neighbors wondered and drivers of passing cars gaped, we had math class. I gave Debbie a 12-inch ruler, and sent her measuring. We went over every problem, illustrating each one with Daddy's shoes. Debbie learned that 18 feet equals 216 inches, and more importantly, she learned why.

When your child just doesn't seem to be able to "get it," you may just need to throw the ball in a different way. Toss it in such a way that he will be able to catch it. Will you compare it to something he already understands? Will you make it relevant to him by showing him how to include people or things that are important to him? Or will you get desperate enough to do something so bizarre that he will remember both the lesson and how it was taught for years to come?

Holly Cepeda lives with her husband Sam and daughter Debbie in Gate City, VA. They have been homeschooling for four years.

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