Most teachers love teaching metaphors—the teacher as guide, as coach, as gardener, as maestro in front of the orchestra. At some point in our careers most of us have been asked to pick or create a metaphor that captures how we view the teacher's role. Doing that in faculty development workshops isn't as popular as it once was, and many of the most common metaphors are too familiar to be very exciting. A new metaphor might enable us to reexperience how a comparison to something unexpected can change the picture of what we do and why and how we do it.
