A study was undertaken to describe how special education teachers explained and viewed their teaching through use of metaphorical language, and how these compared with the responses of regular education teachers in previous research. Subjects were five certified special education teachers of children with mild disabilities. Data were drawn from videotapes of two lessons in each classroom, one the teacher felt confident about teaching and another that the teacher did not feel confident about, and through stimulated-recall interviews on the lessons and follow-up interviews. Results corroborate earlier findings on regular education teachers, and also allowed refinement of categories of ontological metaphor. Among the new findings were that the teachers had distinct notions about their relationships with their students as they moved through the lesson, and that the relationships were defined in terms of their metaphorical distance from and with students as teaching and learning occurred, and also in differential levels of ontological metaphor. Little evidence was found of some ontological categories, but extensive evidence of ontological subcategories and of a new category was found. Contains 61 references. (MSE)