Metaphor Manifestations

Over three to four weeks in the Spring Term, Upper School students craft Scull Essays, a personal narrative on the topic of their choice. While seventh and eighth graders build their essays around a central metaphor to help structure their writing, ninth graders have no limits on style or structure. Unlike the annual speech competition, where stories and ideas are shared with the community, the Scull Essay celebrates writing as a deeply personal and private form of expression. The essays are judged by the English Department using a rubric that reflects the mastery of writing skills required at each grade level, from appropriate use of vocabulary, sophisticated sentence structure, and fluency of writing to the adept use of grammatical conventions. 

This year, the seventh grade English teachers asked their students to stretch their creative muscles further by using the metaphor from their Scull Essay to inspire a design project in Creators class. Each student chose an object that represented the metaphor in their essay and had to design and fabricate a model of that object. One student used the metaphor of a lollipop to represent the swirl of emotions that come with anxiety and 3-D printed a model of a lollipop to paint in rainbow colors. A classmate wrote about the challenge of acclimating to new environments and designed and printed a 3-D waterfall model to represent fish traveling from one body of water to another. The design element encouraged students to think more deeply about the metaphor that is central to their writing. “I think they owned it a little bit more,” says seventh grade English teacher Dan Roy. “It wasn’t just something they had written; it was something they physically made.”

Afterward, students reflected on the design process and shared the challenges that they had overcome and the aspects of the project that made them most proud. On Monday, May 22, the Scull Essay design projects will be on display in a gallery walk event where the community can see how students brought the ideas from their essays to life.